Saturday, September 20, 2014
Marching for Climate
To have a small carbon footprint I will march tomorrow with only a small sign -- one that wears a 3x3-square reminder that dates back to a 1968 essay, "Tragedy of the Commons," by ecologist Garrett Hardin (1915-2003).
There is no
place to throw
that's away.
WHY is it taking us so long to act to preserve a habitable planet? Do we not care about the world we are leaving for our grandchildren?
Friday, August 31, 2012
Fibs in NZ -- and climate change
Saturday, October 4, 2014
Can poetry change the climate for frogs?
Here in this blog, as I present connections between poetry and mathematics, I provide some poems of protest and advocacy. I advocate attention to problems of climate change -- to keep our world habitable; I advocate full recognition of women in the sciences -- for a not dissimilar reason. We must not waste our resources.
Monday, April 22, 2019
Poems in support of Earth Day
Public awareness
and pressure are
the best hope
for effective
climate
action.
And here is a link to several previous EARTH DAY postings..
Thursday, May 6, 2021
Climate Concerns
Ideas become internalized when we WRITE about them -- and I encourage students AND all of us to write about climate change and efforts to save our planet. And then to act on our words! Here are three small syllable-squares, first appearing in a post more than ten years ago and expressing my ongoing concerns for precarious imbalances we have created within our natural environment.
Friday, November 2, 2012
Storm Sandy -- and climate change
storm
Sandy
has caused more
people to believe
climate change is real and awful
than the piles of statistics amassed by scientists --
bad to worse since 1950 --
ice caps melting, drought,
sea levels
rising.
Oh,
My!
This poem of mine, with its syllables counted by successive Fibonacci numbers, is a slight revision of one posted on 31 August 2012. That earlier posting also links to climate change data and to other FIBS.
Saturday, July 25, 2015
Math and Poetry and Climate
No Two Things Can Be More Equal by Madhur Anand
In undergrad I learned about the identity
matrix. Ones on the main diagonal and zeros
elsewhere. Anything multiplied by it is itself.
Friday, July 22, 2022
Worried about Climate Change
When working with students in poetry workshops I often ask them to write to satisfy a constraint -- perhaps a Fib or a square poem -- in order to help them focus their thoughts. This morning -- in the middle of a heat wave -- I focused my thoughts squarely on my growing concerns about climate.
Steamy weather. I count
the degrees. I count on
air conditioning. But
my cooling system adds
to global warming. What
is the right thing to do?
Here is a link to previous postings in this blog that offer climate concerns.
Friday, February 1, 2013
Tomorrow is (or is not) Groundhog Day
When I was growing up (on a farm near Indiana, Pennsylvania) Punxutawney Phil was merely a local celebrity. But the TODAY show and Bill Murray's 1993 film (showing at AFI in Silver Spring tomorrow evening) changed all that. Here, in syllable-square stanzas -- based on the legend and recent climate change developments -- are several groundhog-day comments:
Today's myth
passes, the
world moves on.
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
Clearing the Air with a Poem
One of the things I found is a poem (involving a couple of numbers and mathy words) by Simon Armitage that is printed on material that cleanses the air around it by absorbing pollutants. A small photo from the website of Sheffield University is shown below -- and I urge you to follow the Sheffield link for the story of the poem and this link to see the full poem more clearly and the story behind it. Here is Armitage's opening stanza.
Tuesday, September 6, 2022
From a poetic artist -- "New Math"
Neha Misra, one of my neighbors (in Eastern Village cohousing in Silver Spring, Maryland) is both a poet and a visual artist; in a recent conversation, I asked Neha if she had any mathy poems -- and she volunteered the following lines-- full of rich mathematical terminology paired with multiple -- and thoughtful -- meanings. Thank you, Neha!
New Math by Neha Misra
Because I once scored 49 out of 50
in a Mathematical Physics exam
that I was so proud of, still am.
I do not remember much of
signs of sines and cosines.
I remember the differential equations
were all fine, but I was in love
with the curves of integration—
Because I once taught a scared young boy
in the confident body of a man
to not let his exponential fear of math
come in the way of his waking dreams
of flying with numbers.
Paper and pen in our hands,
together we melted his fear of math
into the heart of zero
and he flew
far far far away from me
on the infinite new wings of those numbers—
Tuesday, May 9, 2017
Save the Climate, change STEM to STEAM
For many years a secondary school teacher in South Australia, Jolly has written Challenging the Divide: Approaches to Science and Poetry (Lythrum Press, 2010) -- a book that is rich with citations and arguments for integrating the arts and the sciences -- and includes a variety of poems. Also rich with math-science content is Jolly's poetry collection, Making a Stand (Wakefield Press, 2015).
And here is one of Jolly's recent poems -- sent to me with this comment: Here's a poem - it deals with numbers in my way. Someone can do the multiplication. Best wishes Erica
A Significant Cabinet Change by the Prime Minister
in this New Coalition Government by Erica Jolly
And reading “Lab Girl: A story of trees, science and love”
by Hope Jahren, published by Fleet, in the UK, 2016.
Professor Jahren was named in 2005 as one of the
“Brilliant 10” young scientists. Geobiology is
her area of study and she is now a tenured
Professor at the University of Hawai’i.
Tuesday, January 16, 2018
Blog history -- title, links for previous posts . . .
Scroll through the titles below, browsing to find items of interest
among the more-than-nine-hundred postings since March 2010
OR
Click on any label -- a list is found in the right-hand column below the author profile
OR
Enter term(s) in the SEARCH box -- and find all posts containing those terms.
For example, here is a link to the results of a SEARCH using math women
And here is a link to a poem by Brian McCabe that celebrates math-woman Sophie Germain.
This link reaches a poem by Joan Cannon that laments her math-anxiety.
This poem expresses some of my own divided feelings.
Monday, January 3, 2011
From 2010 -- titles and dates of posts
A scroll through the 12 months of titles below may lead you to topics and poets/poems of interest. Also helpful may be the SEARCH box at the top of the right-hand column; there you may enter names or terms that you would like to find herein.
Dec 31 The year ends -- and we go on . . .
Dec 30 Mathematicians are NOT entitled to arrogance
Dec 28 Teaching Numbers
Dec 26 Where are the Women?
Dec 21 A Square for the Season
Dec 20 "M" is for Mathematics and . . .
Sunday, April 14, 2013
Neglecting important numbers
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
2012 posts -- titles and links
Dec 30 A chance encounter
Dec 28 Explorers
Dec 25 Support STREET SENSE
Dec 24 Star, shine bright!
Dec 21 Skating (with math) on Christmas
Friday, August 26, 2011
350: Science --> Poetry --> Music
Monday, July 12, 2010
Poetry-application of The Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic
Friday, April 28, 2017
March for Climate -- again!
To have a small carbon footprint I will march tomorrow with only a small sign -- one that wears a 3x3-square reminder that dates back to a 1968 essay, "Tragedy of the Commons," by ecologist Garrett Hardin (1915-2003).
There is no
place to throw
that ' s away.
WHY is it taking us so long to act to preserve a habitable planet? Do we not care about the world we are leaving for our grandchildren?
Saturday, January 3, 2015
2014 (and prior) -- titles, dates of posts
Dec 30 Be someone TO COUNT ON in 2015
Dec 28 A Fractal Poem
Dec 25 A thousand Christmas trees
Dec 24 The gift of a poem
Dec 20 The Girl Who Loved Triangles