Showing posts with label zero. Show all posts
Showing posts with label zero. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 3, 2024

math talk -- a way to learn

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EXPLORE MATHEMATICS BY TALKING ABOUT IT!       math talk: mathematical ideas in poems for two voices   is the  title of a 1991 poetry collec...
Wednesday, April 24, 2024

Math in Shakespeare . . .

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     Yesterday, April 23, is the day on which William Shakespeare's birthday is celebrated; he was born long ago in 1564 and the actual ...
Thursday, June 8, 2023

Inventing Zero

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     A Pennsylvania friend who is now in Oklahoma, Sharon Solloway -- whom I got to know when we were both faculty members at Bloomsburg Un...
1 comment:
Monday, January 11, 2021

Number Personalities . . .

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      Sometimes our experiences with objects or ideas leads us to assign them personalities -- a notion illustrated in the poem "Zero,&...
Friday, September 9, 2016

Division by Zero

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     At Victoria University in Melbourne, novelist, playwright and poet Tom Petsinis also teaches mathematics.  He participated in the 2016...
Monday, June 22, 2015

Uncertainty . . .

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     Sometimes we find things of great value when we are looking for something else -- in fact, Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges has sai...
Friday, March 13, 2015

Three Greguerías

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From Portugal, from Francisco -- who emailed me the gift of these lines: Three Greguerías   by Rámon Gómez de la Serna (1888-1963)   ...
2 comments:
Saturday, January 3, 2015

The Role of Zero

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     In mathematics, as in poetry, multiple meanings are common and create power for the language.   For example, the number 0 is an idempot...
Wednesday, December 24, 2014

The gift of a poem

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     In this holiday season of giving, sometimes the gifts are poems -- and sometimes mathy poems.  A few days ago, "Zero" by Robe...
1 comment:
Friday, October 10, 2014

Taken out of context . . .

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Sometimes good lines fit so well into their poems that their individual merits go unrecognized.  And then, taken out of context, they can le...
Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Love Physics

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It turns out that one of the disadvantages of a long-term blog with lots of worthy material is that sometimes I lose track of fine work that...
Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Found: Elementary Calculus

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Here is a poem by Saskatchewan poet Karen Solie .        Found     by Karen Solie        Elementary Calculus                 From    ...
Sunday, March 16, 2014

Making something of nothing

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     Was zero invented or discovered?  When and how?  By whom?  In "The Origin of Zero" -- an article published in 2009 in in Scie...
Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Number personalities

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In his collection,  Zero , Scottish poet Brian McCabe raises questions about numerical classifications.  He begins "The Fifth Season&q...
Saturday, April 27, 2013

Zero Power

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To neutralize the differing effects of any non-zero numbers -- to wipe out vast differences between numbers -- we may raise each of them to ...
Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Latitude, longitude, and inauguration

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Elizabeth Bodien now lives in a rural area in eastern Pennsylvania -- settling there after other lives in California, in Japan, in West Afr...
Monday, June 18, 2012

Sophie Germain dressed as a man to study math

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One of the fine sources for biographies and other topics in the history of mathematics is MacTutor History of Mathematics archive , hosted...
Friday, June 8, 2012

Computer code -- is poetry?

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Dubliner Eavan Boland is a master poet (and one of my favorites); Ireland shares her with the creative writing program at Stanford Universi...
5 comments:
Monday, April 2, 2012

Valley Voices

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With Richard Aston I share a love for science and logic, a love for poetry, and a love for the Susquehanna Valley.  His home is Wilkes-Bar...
Sunday, November 27, 2011

How much for a digit of PI?

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Scottish poet Brian McCabe writes playfully of numbers.  In the following poem he imagines an auction of the digits of   π .    Three Poi...