One of my favorite mathy poets is Halifax mathematician Robert Dawson -- his work is complex and inventive, and fun to puzzle over. Dawson's webpage at St Mary's University lists his mathematical activity; his poetry and fiction are available in several issues of the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics and in several postings for this blog (15 April 2012, 30 November 2013, 2 March 2014) and in various other locations findable by Google.
Can a poem be written by following a formula? Despite the tendency of most of us to say NO to this question we also may admit to the fact that a formula applied to words can lead to arrangements and thoughts not possible for us who write from our own learning and experiences. How else to be REALLY NEW but to try a new method? Set a chimpanzee at a typewriter or apply a mathematical formula.
Below we offer Dawson's "Hailstone" and follow it with his explanation of how mathematics shaped the poem from its origin as a "found passage" from the beginning of Dickens' Great Expectations.
Showing posts with label recursive. Show all posts
Showing posts with label recursive. Show all posts
Thursday, September 11, 2014
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Chatting about REAL numbers
The term "real number" confuses many who are not immersed in mathematics. For these, to whom 1, 2, 3 and the other counting numbers seem most real, the identification of the real numbers as all infinite decimals (i.e., all numbers representable by points on a number line) seems at first to go beyond intuition. But, upon further reflection, the idea of a number as "real" iff it can represent a distance on a line to the right or left of a central origin, 0, indeed seems reasonable.
Professor Fred Richman of Florida Atlantic University takes on the questions of computability and enumerability of the real numbers in his poem, "Dialogue Between Machine and Man":
Labels:
Cantor,
compute,
decimal,
Fred Richman,
infinite,
irrational,
number line,
pi,
rational,
real number,
recursive
Monday, November 7, 2011
Mathematician-Poet Glaz
Sarah Glaz, a professor-mathematician at the University of Connecticut -- and a poet -- is at the forefront of appreciation and advocacy of mathematics as an art and closely connected to other arts, particularly poetry. Her webpage offers more than a hundred links to "Undergraduate Resources; Math Links for Information and Fun" and to scholarly articles that offer teachers and students math-poetry ideas to ponder carefully. This link, for example goes to an article entitled "The Poetry of Prime Numbers" that Glaz presented at the Bridges 2011 Conference in Portugal.
One of my favorites of Glaz' poems is this one whose structure relies on the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic (see note following the poem). Here is "January 2009" :
One of my favorites of Glaz' poems is this one whose structure relies on the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic (see note following the poem). Here is "January 2009" :
Monday, March 29, 2010
"Mathematical" Limericks
A dozen, a gross, and a score
Plus three times the square root of four
Divided by seven
Plus five times eleven
Is nine squared and not a bit more.
Plus three times the square root of four
Divided by seven
Plus five times eleven
Is nine squared and not a bit more.
Labels:
concentricity,
definition,
Edward Lear,
Leigh Mercer,
limerick,
nonsense,
OEDILF,
Philip Heafford,
puzzle,
Randall Munroe,
recursive
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