Exponential power

From this week's New Yorker (June 27, 2016) from a poem by Maya Ribault entitled "Society of Butterflies" this mathy statement:

                                . . .                 I save  
            for retirement—to my bohemian eyes, 
            a fortune—though they say you need more
            than a million. Immerse yourself in the exponential
            power of dividends.      . . . 

Read the entire poem here.

Palindromes

     Palindromic numbers are not uncommon  -- recently (in the July 12 posting) power-of-eleven palindromes are mentioned.  Palindromic poems are more difficult to find but see, for example, the postings for October 6, 2010 and October 11, 2010.

     At a  recent Kensington Row Bookshop poetry reading, Hailey Leithauser revealed that all but one of the poems in her recent collection Swoop (Graywolf Press, 2014) contain a palindrome.  

And here are a couple of my favorite palindromic phrases:

(the impossible integer)

Never 
odd or 
even. 

(the mathematician's answer when she is offered cake)
  "I prefer pi."

Prove It

After observing that

               1  =  1
and         1 + 3  =  4
and         1 + 3 + 5  =  9
and         1 + 3 + 5 + 7  =  16
and         1 + 3 + 5 + 7 + 9  =  25

it seems easy to conclude that, for any positive integer n, the sum of the first n odd integers is n².

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":

Circle Power

Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle

         by Black Elk (1863-1950)  (translated from Sioux)

Everything the Power of the World does
is done in a circle.  The sky is round,
and I have heard that the earth is round
like a ball, and so are all the stars.
The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. 

Zero Power

To neutralize the differing effects of any non-zero numbers -- to wipe out vast differences between numbers -- we may raise each of them to the power zero.*  When 0 is applied as the exponent for any nonzero number, the result is 1.  So 7⁰ = 1 and 5378 ⁰ = 1 and (.001)⁰ = 1.   And here are "zero power" and other mathematical concepts interpreted in a poem.

     N to the Zero Power     by Laurie Clemens

     He holds one photograph
     featuring one man and one woman.

     Three birds perch on two wires
     forming an isosceles triangle over the last
     red brick street in town.

Writing poetry like mathematics

In an article about the Chilean mathematician and poet Nicanor Parra, Paul M Pearson says, :  "Parra almost wrote poetry like he would a mathematical theorem using an extreme 'economy of language' with 'no metaphors, no literary figures.' "  Today I present work by Nicanor Parra and Richard Aston, both of whom write their poetry with the same economy and care that are used when writing mathematics.