Love mathematics!

In the stanzas below, I have some fun with math terminology.  Hope you'll enjoy it too.

       Love!        by JoAnne Growney

       Love algebra!  Through variable numbers
       of factored afternoons and prime evenings,
       party in and out of your circle of associates,
       identify your identity,  meet your inverse.  

Electronic poetry -- Stephanie Strickland

     Computers offer new opportunities for poetry -- permitting new types of poems.  Animated perhaps, or hypertext, or vast manuscripts of which we can see at most a fragment -- the possibilities are many.  Stephanie Strickland is one of the pioneers of electronic literature -- and this post was sparked by my experiences at her presentations at Georgetown University on February 1.  

Which are "real" numbers?

The adjective "real" in the term "real number" causes confusion for many whose mathematics is casual rather than intense.  I like the mathematical definition of a number as real iff it corresponds to a point on the number line -- for this gives the abstract number a geometric counterpart (an attachment to reality) -- but there are others for whom the reality of a number depends on its emotional connections, perhaps used in ways that poet Ginger Andrews uses numbers in the following poem.