Thursday, April 29, 2010
A Numerical Poem (Fibonacci)
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Poetry inspired by Chaos
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
Dimensions of a soul
She Considers the Dimensions of Her Soul by Young Smith
The shape of her soul is a square.
She knows this to be the case
because she often feels its corners
pressing sharp against the bone
just under her shoulder blades
and across the wings of her hips.
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Action at a distance
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
In the same family -- a poet and a mathematician
Saturday, August 27, 2011
Earthquake and Hurricane
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Dividing by Zero
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Loving a mathematician (Valentine's Day and . . . )
Wednesday, January 11, 2017
Poems starring mathematicians
December 8 "Monsieur Probability" by Brian McCabe
November 13 My abecedarian poems, "I Know a Mathematician" and "Mathematician"
July 5 "Fixed Points" by Susan Case -- about mathematicians in Poland during WWII
July 2 "To Myself" by Abba Kovner
January 30 "Mr Glusenkamp," a sonnet to a geometry teacher by Ronald Wallace
January 28 "Mathematician" by Sherman K Stein
And, here is a link, via PoemHunter.com to "The Mathematician in Love," a poem by William John Macquorn Rankine, a poem that appears also in the multi-variable anthology, Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics (AK Peters, 2008), edited by Sarah Glaz and me. Here is the first (of 8) stanza of Rankine's entertaining poem:
A mathematician fell madly in love
With a lady, young, handsome, and charming:
By angles and ratios harmonic he strove
Her curves and proportions all faultless to prove.
As he scrawled hieroglyphics alarming.
Friday, October 20, 2017
Perfectly Matched -- Poetry and Mathematics
In recent days I have much enjoyed reading -- and rereading -- the variety of poems included in Glaz's new collection Ode to Numbers (Antrim House, 2017). The publisher's author-page includes several sample poems and one of them, "A Woman in Love," offers this appropriate self-description:
I see a streak of mathematics
in almost everything.
Glaz's poetry takes a reader to childhood days in Romania, to mathematics conferences, to a variety of topics in the history of mathematics, and to the inner workings of a beautifully creative mathematical mind. One of my personal favorites among poetic forms is the pantoum -- I love the way that permuted repetition of phrases offers surprising new meanings -- and Glaz's collection offers several of these. Earlier in this blog (at this link) I posted "A Pantoum for the Power of Theorems" and below, with permission, I offer "Mathematical Modeling."
Mathematical Modeling by Sarah Glaz
Mathematical modeling may be viewed
As an organizing principle
That enables us to handle
A vast array of information
Tuesday, March 19, 2024
Honoring Math Teacher and Poet, Amy Uyematsu
On Saturday, March 23 at 2 PM, a poetry-event is planned at Descanso Gardens in La Cañada Flintridge, California to celebrate the life of poet, math teacher, and activist Amy Uyematsu (1947-2023). It was my pleasure to be connected to Amy via various math-related events and her work has been included in previous postings in this blog. (Here's a link to a list of those earlier posts.)
One of my favorite poems of Amy's is "The Meaning of Zero: A Love Poem." The complete poem is found here at Poets. org and in the collection Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics-- and I offer its opening stanzas below.
Uyematsu's complete poem is available at this link. |
Saturday, May 26, 2012
Crocheting mathematics
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Ray Bobo's mathematical poem
Tuesday, February 2, 2021
Celebrate Black History with Poetry
In February now, Black History Month, I look back to one of my favorite poets, Langston Hughes (1902-1967) and bring to you, again, one of his mathy poems:
Addition by Langston Hughes (1902-1967)
7 x 7 + love =
An amount
Infinitely above:
7 x 7 − love.
Hughes' poem "Addition" is found in Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics (A K Peters/CRC Press, 2008) and was first posted in this blog on February 20, 2011.
This link leads to results of a blog SEARCH for postings for "Black History."
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Poetry with base 10
Friday, September 9, 2022
Enriching Poetry with Mathematical Ideas
An important leader in the community of writers who link mathematics and poetry is Sarah Glaz --
a scholar who is not only a mathematician and poet but also an
organizer, participant, publicist, and recorder for numerous math-poetry
events. Glaz is an emeritus professor of mathematics at the University
of Connecticut and her UConn webpage is a vast source of mathematical and poetry treasures.
I first came to know Sarah well as we worked together on an important project -- gathering poems for the anthology Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics (A K Peters / CRC Press, 2008). A preview of this collection is available here. Here, from that collection, is one of my favorites -- a thoughtful poem about parenting and attitudes (love? or not?) toward mathematics:
Love Story by Sarah Glaz
If I ever write about you--
he said--
it will be a love story
a story about
how much you want to be loved.
Father, do you love
your little girl?
I brought you
a soup full
of numbers
formulas chopped to perfection
integrals fried to a crisp
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Square comment on shoe styles
The Latvian capital, Riga, is a charming city--and its cobblestone streets do not deter women from wearing elegant tall-heeled shoes. The sight of them reminded me of a little poem I wrote a few years ago--a square poem--which comments on this stylish sort of shoe (in which I've never been able to walk).
Wednesday, October 20, 2021
Inspired by Ten
Here is an intriguing poem by Massachusetts poet Ellen Wehle that focuses on ten; it is one of the works collected in Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics (AK Peters/CRC Press, 2008).
The Song of 10 by Ellen Wehle
From the Romans' decem our decibels and decimal system, O tenfold
the sorrows of Israel, Decameron tales mean to be told over ten nights
in December, solstice month frozen in moondrifts of snow. Our fingers
and toes. Kingly ten-pointed stags reigning over Europe's greenwoods,
for miners a measure in tons of coal or type of tallow candle weighted
ten per pound, the legion poor mending by by its light. What else is there
to say? Higher than nine. A number whose power is mighty to multiply,
comprising one and nil, wand and egg, gold spindle and heavenly wheel
of goddess Fate who turns time and tides; what our parents say summer
evenings, hearing our voices dart and flicker in neighboring yards before
we dance from them into darkness and love's rule ends--I'll count to ten.
Thursday, April 7, 2016
"The Computation"
I scarce believed thou couldst be gone away,
For forty more, I fed on favours past,
And forty on hopes, that thou wouldst, they might last.
Tears drowned one hundred, and sighs blew out two,
A thousand, I did neither think, nor do,
Or not divide, all being one thought of you;
Or in a thousand more, forgot that too.
Yet call not this long life; but think that I
Am, by being dead, immortal; can ghosts die?