Mathematics of desire

Last Monday evening, I listened with pleasure to Pennsylvania (Fogelsville) poet Barbara Crooker read at Cafe Muse (with Meredith Davies Hadaway and Erin Murphy). Barbara writes fine poems -- and reads them well. Although she offered no mathematical poems that evening, hearing her reminded me to hunt for her love poem "The Irrational Numbers of Longing . . " and to offer it to you here:

Analysis of a sacred site

Poet Allison Hedge Coke descends from moundbuilders and mixed ancestry from several Native American communities with several Europoean ones.  Her verse play, Blood Run, is dedicated to the original citizens of the former city now named Blood Run along the Big Sioux River and to all who work to preserve sacred sites. Moreover, the entire text is mathematically encoded.   Chadwick Allen, an English professor whose interests include American Indian and New Zealand Maori literatures and cultures, has written an article for American Literature that explores the sacred numbers and thematic geometry that connects Hedge Coke's verse with the sacred site; we will offer a sample of Allen's analysis following "Snake Mound"from Blood Run: 

I have dreamed geometry

   Descartes     by Jorge Luis Borges

   I am the only man on earth, but perhaps there is neither earth nor man.
   Perhaps a god is deceiving me.
   Perhaps a god has sentenced me to time, that lasting illusion.
   I dream the moon and I dream my eyes perceiving the moon.
   I have dreamed the morning and evening of the first day.

Found in Flatland

Over the years I have shared with friends and students my copy of Edwin Abbott's Flatland (first published in England in 1884) and, alas, not all of these other readers have matched my level of excitement with the small volume.  Even though the book's Victorian attitudes are mostly at odds with my own views, still the tiny book opened me to possibilities of new ways of seeing. Since observing the Flatlanders stuck in two dimensions from my advantageous three-dimensional position, I have wondered how I can now make the leap from three to four or more dimensions.

Personal geometry

We have recently passed the first anniversary of the death (6 May 2010) of Elena Shvarts, one of Russia's finest contemporary poets. Here is her "Poetica -- More Geometrico" (translated into English by Thomas Epstein).

Sonnet for a geometry teacher

Wisconsin poet Ronald Wallace has fun with math-words in the following sonnet that celebrates a teacher of plane geometry. 

Hyperbolic effects

Last month I went to the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef Exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History -- for a photo scroll down to the end of this post -- and that visit provoked me to begin searching for the term "hyperbolic" in poems.   I came close when I found "hyperbola" in a poem by Jonathan Holden and hyperbole in a sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning: 

Geometry and autism

We do not easily describe what goes on inside our own heads and have still greater difficulty seeing into the minds of others.  Pennsylvania poet Barbara Crooker uses images from geometry to help us to see into autism. 

Horizon line

Poet James Galvin often uses mathematical imagery in his poems.

   Art Class      by James Galvin
  
   Let us begin with a simple line,
   Drawn as a child would draw it,
   To indicate the horizon,  

Voices in a Geometry Classroom

I have been invited to return next week (October 20 at 7 PM) to Bloomsburg University, where I taught mathematics for lots of years, for a poetry reading.  Preparation for the reading (which celebrates my new book, Red Has No Reason) drew my thinking back to my teaching days at Bloom and to "Geometry Demonstration," a poem about the arguments in my head as I faced a particularly challenging class of geometry students.  Here it is.

Ideal Geometry -- complex politics

Christopher Morley (1890-1957) was an American poet, novelist, and publisher who was the son of a poet and musician (Lilian Janet Bird) and a mathematics professor (Frank Morley) at Haverford College. His "Sonnet by a Geometer," below, is written in the voice of a circle and compares mathematical perfection with human imperfection.  For us who read the poem 90 years after its writing, Morley's phrase in line 13 -- "They talk of 14 points" -- is puzzling at first.

A wedding song -- shaped by mathematics

This posting includes a stanza from of "A Wedding on Earth" by Annie Finch.  In the poet's words: the poem has 11 stanzas with 11 lines for a total of 121 lines, this number symbolizing the two single members of a pair joining into a 2, which is the prevailing theme of the poem; and each stanza combining [averaging] the stanza of Spenser's epithalamion (18 lines)  with Sappho's stanza (4 lines).

In the same family -- a poet and a mathematician

When a poet and a mathematician are members of the same family, understandings result.  Ohio poet Cathryn Essinger is a twin of a mathematician and writes about this relationship.  Here are opening stanzas of two of her poems.

Poems starring mathematicians - 6 (Mandelbrot)

More familiar than the name Benoit Mandelbrot are images, like the one to the left, of the fractal that bears his name.  Born in Poland (1924) and educated in France, Mandelbrot moved to the US in 1958 to join the research staff at IBM. A fractal is a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is a reduced-size copy of the whole, a property called self-similarity. 

Poems of Calculus

In her thoughtful poem "Calculus" mathematician-poet Sarah Glaz writes of sharing with her students some of their subject's history--a drama enacted by two different sorts of mathematician.  Here are Glaz' opening lines:

W. H. Auden's Kingdom of Number

Some poetry is termed "mathematical" because mathematical terminology is included in the text of the poem, often to vivid effect. Such is the case in this poem by W H Auden, in which it is also the case that most lines have 11 syllables.