Reduce stress in math class -- write a poem

       Recently I have come across a website for the New England Literary Resources Center -- and one of the suggestions offered for managing stress in a math class is by writing poems; here is a link to a sample of stressed students' poems. 

     My favorite suggestion for inexperienced poets who take pen in hand is to choose a syllable-count structure to follow -- such as a syllable-square or a snowball or a Fib . . .. AND, from the website Pen and the Pad, here are some additional ideas to consider:   How to Write a Mathematical Poem (penandthepad.com)

And, as I worried, I wrote this Fib:

          Stop . . .
          Think . . .        
          Wonder
          What to say!
          I gather my thoughts
          and hope I can make a poem!

Filling my coffee cup . . .

      When I am asked to give a poetry workshop that includes people who have not written poetry, I find that asking them to concentrate on syllable-counts per line helps them to lose their apprehension about finding suitable words.  And here is a silly sample that illustrates that notion.

A syllable-snowball, growing layer by layer!

Filling my new coffee cup

     My
     coffee
     cup begins
     half full – I add
     more --  one-quarter-cup   
     to make three-fourths, one-eighth
     to reach seven-eighths, next add     
     one-sixteenth, and so on, never
     overflowing  --   almost, almost full.           

A syllable-snowball is a poem built from a sequence of lines whose whose syllable-counts increase (or decrease) by one from line to line.  Here is a link to the results of a blog-search that offers additional examples of snowballs. 

Too soon -- Maryam Mirzakhani taken by cancer

     The brilliant and celebrated mathematician -- and 2014 Fields Medal Winner -- Maryam Mirzakhani has, on July 14 at age 40, died after a long battle with cancer.  I learned this sad news from NPR.  The radio story tells that (as was the case also for me) early in her life, Mirzakhani had wanted to be a writer, but her mathematical talents won out.  Her description of mathematics is a charming one and math deserves to be more-often pictured in this positive way:

          It
          is fun --
          like solving
          a puzzle or
          connecting the dots
          in a detective case.

This stanza-form, in which lines grow in length by one syllable at a time, is called a syllable-snowball.

Numbers for Christmas . . .

*
o n
t o p
g i v e
l i g h t
f r e e l y
f o r e v e r
a b u n d a n t
b r i l l i a n t
e v e r y w h e r e

LOVE MATH!

Christmas is coming and I have looked back to earlier posts for holiday greetings -- a version of the growing snowball poem above was first posted in 2012 and here, from 2010, is a Christmas verse that celebrates pi:

Pushkin poetry, Markov chains

A Markov chain is a mathematical process that can be used to answer questions such as these:
          If the current letter I am reading is a vowel, what is the probability 
          that the next letter will be a vowel?  A consonant? 
Answers from these may be combined to create more lengthy predictions -- about the 3rd letter after a given one, or the 10th -- and so on. 
     A recent article by Brian Hayes in American Scientist (brought to my attention by Greg Coxson) alerted me to the fact that it is 100 years since the Russian mathematician A. A. Markov (1856 - 1922) announced his findings about these transition probabilities -- and, moreover, his work was based on analysis of poetry; the poetry was Eugene Onegin, a verse-novel in iambic tetrameter by Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837). Markov's analyis dealt with Pushkin's novel as a long string of alphabetic characters and he tabulated the categories of vowels and consonants for about 20,000 letters. (For a host of details, visit Hayes' careful and interesting article.)

Growing lines . . .

 Maximizing Meaning (maybe)

How
many
syllables
will fit on this
single line segment?
_____________________________________________________

Star, shine bright!

*
on
top
give
light
freely
forever
abundant
brilliant
everywhere

Be our

light!

For more visual poetry of Christmas, enjoy a visit to Bob Grumman's Guest Blog posting for Scientific American.  Thanks, Bob, and Happy Holiday wishes to all.

Math super-hero

One day not long ago I told my Silver Spring neighbor, Nancy KapLon (nee Lon), of my interest in helping outstanding math-women to be more widely known.  Nancy told me about her wonderful and excellent favorite teacher -- geometer Jean Bee Chan of Sonoma State University in California. Nancy ('93) was a  first generation college student and Dr. Chan, as her mentor, guided her through the undergraduate experience to graduation with distinction and graduate school. Here is a syllable snowball, grown in Chan's honor. 

Math-women -- snowballing . . .

These syllable-snowball poems (increasing by one syllable from line to line)
note a few of the (living) math-women I admire.  

They are modest offerings --
not great poetry nor fully recognizing many accomplishments--  

but I want to start a ball rolling: 
look around you and notice the amazing math-women. 

Visit BRIDGES -- for (art and) poetry

This growing-then-melting syllable-snowball poem is offered in recognition of mathematician-and-poet Sarah Glaz and as a reminder of the poetry reading Glaz is organizing --  to be held at the 2012 BRIDGES Math-Art conference at Towson University, July 25-29.

Celebrate Constraints -- Happy Birthday, OULIPO

Patrick Bahls and Richard Chess of the University of North Carolina at Ashville have organized a "Conference on Constrained Poetry" to be held on November 19-20 in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of OULIPO (short for French: OUvroir de LIttérature POtentielle), founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. The group defines the term littérature potentielle as (rough translation): "the seeking of new structures and patterns that may be used by writers in any way they enjoy." Constraints are used to trigger new ideas and the Oulipo group is an ongoing source of novel techniques, often based on mathematical ideas -- such as counting letters and syllables, substitution algorithms,  permutations, palindromes, and even chess problems.

Snowballs -- growing/shrinking lines

Today's post explores poetic structures called snowballs developed by the Oulipo (see also March 25 posting) and known to many through the writings of Scientific American columnist Martin Gardner (1914-2010).  TIME Magazine's issue for January 10, 1977 had an article entitled "Science:  Perverbs and Snowballs" that celebrated both Gardner and the inventive structures of the Oulipo. Oulipian Harry Mathews' "Liminal Poem" (to the right) is a snowball (growing and then melting) dedicated to Gardner.  The lines in Mathew's poem increase or decrease by one letter from line to line.   Below left, a poem by John Newman illustrates the growth-only snowball.