Judith Grabiner and Howard Nemerov

     Last evening at the Distinguished Lecture Series sponsored by the MAA it was my privilege to hear an outstanding presentation by Judith Grabiner entitled "Space: Where Sufficient Reason Isn't Enough."  (I invite you to go to the MAA website to learn more about Grabiner and her talk.)
     Grabiner is a math-woman I have long admired and, after the lecture, while I was shaking her hand and thanking her for the excellent presentation, I took a moment to ask her if she had any favorite mathy poems.  Although surprised by my question she was able to cite Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnet XLIII  that counts the ways of love -- a few lines of which are found here -- and the name Howard Nemerov, whom readers of this blog know is one of my favorite poets.
     You may scroll down to find Nemerov's "Magnitudes" (found also at PoetryFoundation.com and PoemHunter.com along with other work by this fine poet).  Poet Laureate of the United States during 1988-1990, Howard Nemerov  (1920-1991) served as a combat pilot during World War II and maintained a continuing interest in the stars and navigation.  Here are links to my earlier postings of poems by this favorite poet.

"Two Pair"      "Grace to Be Said at the Super Market"
"Lion and Honeycomb"     "Creation Myth on a Mobius Band"
"To David, About His Education"     "Found Poem"    "Figures of Thought"

And here, expressing concerns about our planet, is Nemerov's "Magnitudes":

A Cento from Arcadia

Last week I had the enjoyable privilege of visiting with mathematician-poet Marion Cohen's math-lit class, "Truth and Beauty" at Arcadia University -- and the class members helped me to compose a Cento (given below), a poem to which each of us contributed a line or two of poetry-with-mathematics.  Participants, in addition to Dr. Cohen and me, included these students: 
          Theresa, Deanna, Ian, Collin, Mary, Grace, Zahra, Jen, Jenna, 
          Nataliya, Adeline, Quincy, Van, Alyssa, Samantha, Alexis, Austin.
Big thanks to all!

Graffiti Calculus

     In my dreams I am an artist -- a cartoonist, perhaps, or a graffiti artist -- so skilled with lines and curves and so clever that my art gives pleasure AND delivers a punch.
     And so I am gratefully into the math-art connections provoked by a new book by Mary-Sherman Willis -- aptly titled Graffiti Calculus (CW Books, 2013).  I first met Willis in December, at Cafe Muse (where I will read next Monday, Feb 3 with Stephanie Strickland) and it was my pleasure also to hear her read again from that collection at the Joint Mathematics Meetings.  These poems by Willis give us, in sixty poetic chapters, the story of a mother seeking her son by following his graffiti tags through the city.  Here is a sample, sections 5 and 6: 

The minute in infinity

From  Treatise on Infinite Series     by Jacob Bernoulli

Even as the finite encloses an infinite series
      And in the unlimited limits appear,
So the soul of immensity dwells in minutia
      And in narrowest limits no limits inhere.
What joy to discern the minute in infinity!
      The vast to perceive in the small, what divinity! 
 
                    Translated from the Latin by Helen M. Walker

Found in the anthology, Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics (A K Peters, 2008), edited by Sarah Glaz and me.  A complete table of Contents for this collection may be found here.

Seeing Distance -- geometry in photography

One of my favorite poem-stanza styles is a syllable-square -- it distributes the weights of the words in a way that pleases me. The poem below has squares of several sizes and I post it as a prior-to-seeing-the-exhibit opposite to my response to photography currently displayed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum -- "Pilgrimage," by Annie Leibovitz. While many photographs, my own in particular, seem particularly flat, such was not the case with these. As if I were wearing special lenses, I was able to see and feel depth – not only in a view of Niagara Falls but also in the fabric and buttons of a dress that had belonged to Emily Dickinson.

350: Science --> Poetry --> Music

350 parts per million is the "safe upper limit" for CO₂ in our atmosphere presented by NASA scientist Jim Hansen in December 2007 and widely agreed upon.  From that number 350.org .was born. On October 24, 2009, 350 Poems celebrated an international day of climate action with a posting, from poets all around the world, of 350 poems of 3.5 lines each --  each responding to concern for man-made climate change. 

Ray Bobo's mathematical poem

Ray Bobo, a retired Georgetown mathematics professor, has written a love poem with mathematical symbols.  And, for those of us who might be unsure how to interpret the mathematics, Bobo has provided a parallel column with an English-language  interpretation of his mathematics.  Enjoy! 

Poetry with mathematical symbols

On the internet and elsewhere a variety of viewpoints are expressed about the criteria poetry should satisfy to be "mathematical." Today I want to introduce samples and links for three writers:   Bob Grumman (Florida), Gregory Vincent St Thomasino (New York), and Kaz Maslanka (California).  Grumman and Maslanka write poems with a strong visual element and, as the blogs and comments for all three testify, they differ in their views of what may be properly called "mathematical" poetry..