Visiting the Australian Poetry Library

     An Australian poet (Erica Jolly) whom I have met through this blog has helped me to learn about the great variety of poetry and related activities that are available on her continent  -- and today I want to link you to the Australian Poetry Library and to offer a mathy poem by Peter Goldsworthy that I enjoyed there.

     1     by Peter Goldsworthy 

       Arithmetic divides 
       and rules the world,
       freezing the flow
       in single frames,
       colourising each
       by numbers.

Sex, Maths, and the Brain

I found this poetry in an abstract (with a link posted at "Women in Maths" on Facebook) for a lecture by Professor Gina Rippon entitled "Sex, Maths, and the Brain" at Aston University in Birmingham, England, on 30 June 2015.  Enjoy!

Is there such a thing as a maths 
brain? Are mathematicians born 
or made?  Is the lack of girls 
in maths subjects 
a 'brain' problem?

Square stanzas for Women in Maths

Women

in Maths --

it all

adds up.

     Go here for "It All Adds Up" -- a story in plus Magazine by Rachel Thomas about the recent Women in Maths conference sponsored by the London Mathematical Society.

     And if you know of POEMS that celebrate women in mathematics, please contact me (email address at bottom of blog) or post a link in the comments to this post.

Math rap

     Harry Baker is a Slam Champion who studies Maths at Bristol University, UK -- and his poetry sometimes features math, often having fun with the topic.  His web page has a link to a rap about maths and at the JMM reading in Boston in 2012, Baker submitted this rap, 59 (a love story, now on YouTube), for presentation that evening.

Teaching math (?maths) is complex

     In the midst of a teaching career in Bloomsburg University I spent a year in an administrative position -- the school needed time to search for a proper provost and I was deemed good enough for the interim.  My good fortune during that year was to work closely with Kalyan, a highly competent man, born in India, who went on (as I did not) to become a college president.  Kalyan and I liked each other and early in the year we shared our views that we were both from "work twice as hard" categories.  That is, a woman or a dark-skinned man needs to work twice as hard as a white man to achieve recognition as the performance-equal of that white man. 

Math or poetry -- must one choose?

April celebrates poetry and mathematics -- it being both National Poetry Month and Mathematics Awareness Month -- and this year's math-theme is "Mathematics, Statistics, and the Data Deluge."  What better way to mark these joint occasions than with a poem of statistics.  I first learned of Eveline Pye -- a lively and interesting Glasgow statistician, teacher, and poet -- through "Eveline Pye: Poetry in Numbers"  in the September 2011 issue of the statistics magazine, Significance.  Here is one of the poems found therein, aptly titled "Statistics."

Hamilton -- mathematician, poet, Irishman

     October 15-22 is Maths Week in Ireland -- as I learned from this article in the Irish Times celebrating maths and the Irish mathematician Willam Rowan Hamilton (1805 - 1865).  Turns out that Hamilton's quaternions are useful in design of video games and 3D effects in the cinema.
     Hamilton -- a mathematician, astronomer, and physicist -- was also a poet; a contemporary and friend of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. His poems do not speak of mathematics -- but here is a sonnet he wrote to honor Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768 – 1830), a prominent French mathematician and physicist.