Use a phone App to find mathy poems

A day late, Happy Birthday, E. E. Cummings 

(b 14 October 1894, d 3 September 1962).

     One of my favorite poetry sites is PoetryFoundation.org -- publisher of POETRY Magazine and supplier of a wonderful phone app (also entitled POETRY).  The app offers access to an enormous data-base of poems, sorted into categories that may be accessed using a SPIN feature, activated by touch.  Spinning the upper layer of categories can lead to "Humor" or "Joy" or "Insecurity" or  . . ..  Spinning the lower layer of categories can lead to "& Life" or  "& Nature" or . . . . When my spin picked the match of "Humor" and "& Arts and Sciences" I found a list of 263 poems.  One was Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky."  I also found the tiny poem "Nothing"  by Ken Mikolowski that plays with meaning as mathematicians also love to do. 

Squaring the Circle

Reminding us of the ancient unsolvable problem that so many attempted, the July/August 2014 issue of Poetry Magazine contains "Squaring the Circle," a poem by Philip Fried.  Here are the opening lines; please follow the Poetry Magazine link above to enjoy the full poem.

from  Squaring the Circle     by Philip Fried

       It's a little-known fact that God's headgear --
       A magician's collapsible silk top hat,
       When viewed from Earth, from the bottom up
       Is, sub specie aeternitatis,

       A pluperfect halo, both circle and square,
         . . .

    

Two previous posts that also consider the circle-squaring problem include 10 May 2010 and 21 April 2010.

Margaret Cavendish (1623-73) -- The Circle of the Brain cannot be Squared

Margaret Cavendish (1623-73) was a writer who published under her own name at a time when most women published anonymously.  Her writing addressed a number of topics, including gender equity and scientific method.

April -- Poetry, Math, and Boxing

April continues—both as National Poetry Month and as Mathematics Awareness Month (with theme math and sports).  As in the April 9 posting on baseball, in this post I also blend these interests with a math-and-sports poem--this one celebrates boxer Sugar Ray Robinson.