This blog (then and now) and Pascal

     When I began this blog in 2010, I imagined up to 100 postings -- I saw it as a way to share math-related poetry that I had written and gathered during my years of teaching.  Now, as I prepare my 748th post, I am thinking about how I can organize my posts to make them findable and useful to the reader who visits and browses herein.

One thing that I have recently done is to update the blog's searchability -- 
in the right column you will find a search box.  

If you enter a term like "math" into the box, the search finds most of the posts in the entire blog and is thus not very helpful -- but you might try the term "triangle" and you would find about 20 relevant posts; one of them (from October 13, 2010) has the title "Varieties of triangles -- by Guillevic" and is the most-visited entry herein.  If you are, like me, someone who looks for math publicity and opportunities for girls, you may choose to enter "girl" in the search box.  This search, too, will lead to about 20 postings. 

Banach's Match Box Problem

A poetry collection by Susan Case (see also 5 July 2011 posting)  -- The Scottish Cafe (Slapering Hole Press, 2002) -- celebrates the lives and minds of a group of mathematicians in Poland during World War II. Its observations and insights add a new dimension to the important story of the Scottish Book to which it refers -- a book in which the mathematicians reorded their problems and solutions. First published in a mimeographed edition in 1957 by Stanislaw Ulam, The Scottish book: mathematics from the Scottish Café (Birkhäuser, 1981) may now be seen and searched at GoogleBooks.  Case's collection includes statements of two of the Scottish Book's problems:  here, below, is "problem 193" -- which I offer as a "found poem."  A photo of its Scottish Book solution follows.

Mathematicians divide

One of my fine graduate courses at Hunter College was a "World Poetry" course taught by William Pitt Root.  One of our texts was Against Forgetting:  Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (W W Norton, 1993), edited by Carolyn Forché.  In this collection is found "To Myself," a poem that confronts fear, by Abba Kovner (1818-1987), a hero of anti-Nazi resistance. Kovner dares to open the poem with the word "Mathematicians."

Fear of math

California poet Carol Dorf is a high school math teacher (and has taught in a science museum) -- and images from math and science permeate her work.  An article on math anxiety (and its connections to the brain) in today's Washington Post brought to my mind this poem of hers: 

Who are our prophets?

Here is the opening sentence of an article, "Mathematicians and Poets," by Cai Tianxin, a mathematics professor at Zhejiang University -- it appears in the April 2011 issue of Notices of the AMS:

     "Mathematicans and poets exist in our world as uncanny prophets."