Showing posts with label perfect. Show all posts
Showing posts with label perfect. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 13, 2016
A Fib (a perfect circle) -- and some math-po links
1 Not
1 one
2 circle
3 is perfect
5 yet the idea
8 of circle's useful every day.
The beauty of images and the ideas they represent is central in both mathematics and poetry. A wonderful resource for works that join these two is the literary website TalkingWriting,com -- whose poetry editor is Carol Dorf, also a math teacher. Here is a link to a wonderful TW essay from a few years back, "Math Girl Fights Back" by Karen J Ohlson. This article by Dorf, "Why Poets Sometimes think in Numbers," introduces a 2012 collection of mathy poems. Another collection was posted in the Spring 2016 issue. In addition, at the TalkingWriting website, you can enter the search term "math" -- as I did -- and be offered 5 pages of links to consider.
Labels:
Carol Dorf,
circle,
Karen Ohlson,
perfect,
talkingwriting.com
Tuesday, May 10, 2016
A 6 x 6 syllable-square -- and links to more . . .
Last Sunday's paper had
an essay by a clown
who said as long as I
play dumb people let me
do what I want. And I
cannot stop wondering.
6, a perfect number
Find lots of mathy poems here at TalkingWriting.com; this week featuring Sarah Glaz.
At this link find poems, etc. by Spelman College math students working with Colm Mulcahy.
Labels:
6,
clown,
Colm Mulcahy,
perfect,
Sarah Glaz,
square
Thursday, September 24, 2015
C K Williams -- Three Mile Island
A poet whose work I have long enjoyed, C K Williams (1936-1915), died a few days ago. (You may find a generous sample of his poems online -- for example at PoetryFoundation.org and Poets.org.) Williams is a poet whose writing does not tend toward mathematics but his very fine poem "Tar" (about the Three Mile Island nuclear plant crisis of 1979, a year when I lived in Pennsylvania not far away) has a few numbers. I present below the first stanza of "Tar" and, beneath it, a link to the rest of the poem.
from Tar by C. K. Williams
The first morning of Three Mile Island: those first disquieting,
uncertain, mystifying hours.
from Tar by C. K. Williams
The first morning of Three Mile Island: those first disquieting,
uncertain, mystifying hours.
Labels:
accident,
C K Williams,
perfect,
poem,
Three Mile Island,
Yogi Berra
Monday, February 10, 2014
To love, in perfect syllables
While looking for Valentine verse with a math connection, I opened my copy of The Complete Illustrated Works of Lewis Carroll (Chancellor Press, 1982). And found this one in which Carroll (a pen name for English mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodson (1832-1898)) uses the word one twice and the word half twice and has counted sounds so that in each line the number of syllables is either a cube of an integer or is perfect.
Lesson in Latin by Lewis Carroll (May 1888)
Lesson in Latin by Lewis Carroll (May 1888)
Labels:
Charles Lutwidge Dodson,
count,
cube,
half,
Lewis Carroll,
love,
mathematician,
mathematics,
one,
Pablo Neruda,
perfect,
Valentine
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
Conversational mathematics
In recent weeks I have been experimenting with poems that use mathematical terminology, wondering whether -- since there are readers who are undaunted by unknown literary references (to Dante's Divine Comedy or Eliot's Prufrock, for example) -- some readers will relish a poem with unexplained mathematical connections. In this vein I have offered "Love" (posted on on November 5) and now give the following poem, "Small Powers of Eleven are Palindromes":
Labels:
Catalan,
cube,
irrational,
JoAnne Growney,
language,
mathematics,
number,
palindrome,
perfect,
poem,
power,
twin primes
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