Euclid meets Broadway

Several years ago while visiting my older son in Colorado Springs I also went to nearby Boulder where, driving along Broadway, I came to a street sign that made me gasp with delight.  I was at the intersection of Broadway and Euclid. That fact, that suggestion of a merge of two worlds, needed to be part of a poem. Some time later I wrote:

   Butterfly Proposal     by JoAnne Growney

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:

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).

Miroslav Holub, poet and scientist

Miroslav Holub (1923-1998), Czech poet and immunologist who excelled in both endeavors, is one of my favorite poets.  He combines scientific exactitude with empathy and absurdity.  Here are samples:

The Corporal Who Killed Archimedes

With one bold stroke

he killed the circle, tangent

and point of intersection

in infinity.