In the same family -- a poet and a mathematician

When a poet and a mathematician are members of the same family, understandings result.  Ohio poet Cathryn Essinger is a twin of a mathematician and writes about this relationship.  Here are opening stanzas of two of her poems.

Counting on things -- a prose poem

Russell Edson is one of the contemporary masters of the prose poem (a poem whose words are organized into paragraphs rather than stanzas). A selection from May Swenson's prose poem (and short novel) "Giraffe" is available in the October 19 blog posting. Here is Edson's poem "One Two Three, One Two Three" -- which considers the secrets hidden inside one's head.  Another mind, even that of one of our children, is a mystery incompletely known to any of us.

Counting: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, . . .

At Peter Cameron's Blog, "Counting the things that need to be counted," the July 14, 2010 entry contains a reflective poem entitled "Millenium" which meditates on the ten digits in stanzas whose lengths count them.  Here are the opening stanzas: 

Counting the women

     The stimulus for this posting appeared a few weeks ago in the Washington Post -- in an article that considers the loneliness of women in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, math). 
     For me, it was never a conscious thing -- the counting.  It simply happened.  The numbers are small and you know, if you are a woman and a mathematician in a room full of mathematicians, how many women are in the room.  Any room.  It is a small counting number.  Sometimes it is 1. 

Counting the seconds -- and leap seconds

      Keeping time is a simple matter of counting -- counting seconds, summing them into minutes, hours, days. Or is it? Recent news has included mention of the changing length of our solar day and the need for insertion of leap seconds.   (A leap second is a one-second adustment to the time kept by precise atomic clocks -- to keep this latter time close to mean solar time. No leap-seconds were added in 2011 but NPR and The Washington Post recently announced that a leap second will be added June 30, 2012. At 7:59:59 PM, Eastern time, the US Naval Observatory will skip a second to 8:00:00 PM.  Wikipedia offers detailed background on this concept.)     Extra time is a fond wish for many of us -- and Leonard Orr has penned a love poem suggesting how one more second might be delightfully crowded with so much more than could happen in "regular" time. 

A FIRST-LOVE in math-poetry -- "Counting Rhymes"

     Still in my head are counting rhymes that I learned in childhood -- an early connection between mathematics and poetry that I think helped me to love both subjects.  Here is a link to a list of more than forty math-rhymes -- and including one that is also in Spanish.
     This rhyme is one that has been useful to me throughout both childhood and adulthood-- as I strive to remember which months have thirty days.

          Thirty days hath September,
          April, June, and November;
          All the rest have thirty-one,
          Excepting February alone,
          Which has twenty-eight in line,
          Till leap-year gives it twenty-nine.

AND, today's issue of the Washington Post has a cartoon by Tom Toles -- about recounting votes after last week's election -- that also involves a counting rhyme:  I offer part of the rhyme below but the visual is critical -- and available here.

          One, two, none for you.
          Three, four, they fell on the floor.
          Five, six, it takes some tricks . . .
          Seven, eight, to make America great.
               . . .
For a few more rhymes, check out this 2013 post, "Nursery Rhyme Mathematics."

Counting What's Left

     Recently at the 2018 Split This Rock Poetry Festival, I purchased a copy of ghost fishing:  An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology edited by poet Melissa Tuckey (University of Georgia Press, 2018) and, below, I offer a sad poem about "counting" from this anthology.   There is much to value in this fine anthology; follow this link for more information.

As If Hearing Heavy Furniture Moved on the Floor Above Us

                                                 by Jane Hirshfield

As things grow rarer, they enter the ranges of counting.
Remain this many Siberian tigers,
that many African elephants. Three hundred red egrets.
We scrape from the world its tilt and meander of wonder
as if eating the last burned onions and carrots from a cast iron pan.
Closing eyes to taste better the char of ordinary sweetness.

Hirshfield's poem also is found in the Split This Rock Poetry Database along with many other poems of environmental concern and protest.  It was first published in Washington Square Review.   This link connects to work by Jane Hirshfield featured in previous postings for this blog.

2015 (and prior) -- titles, dates, links for posts

If you wish to easily BROWSE past postings . . .

Scroll down to find titles and dates and links to postings in 2015.  

OR follow these year-number links to go to lists of posts through 2014, 2013, 2012 and 2011 -- and all the way back to March 2010 when this blog was begun. At the top of the column to the right is a SEARCH box for the blog and this link leads to a PDF file of searchable topics and names of poets and mathematicians presented herein.  Scrolling down the right-hand column leads to a partial list of LABELS that are linked to a list of blogs that contain them.
   Dec 31  Precision leads to poetry . . .
   Dec 28  Can a woman learn science (or mathematics)?
   Dec 24  And now welcome Christmas . . .
   Dec 22  Let us not forget . . .
   Dec 20  Who put the pie in Pythagoras?
   Dec 18  A student writes poetry for a math class . . .
   Dec 15  Generalized Pythagorean Theorem--a visual poem? 

Browse Math-Poetry Links . . .

     Today I invite you to browse -- to spend a moment reading titles, clicking on a title that intrigues you.   ENJOY!

• TITLES OF POSTS (with links)
•      January, 2020
  •     We become what we think . . .
  •     With bits of mathematics, a poem for a New Year
•      December, 2019 
  •     Poetry made visual with math terms
  •     Math-poetry in support of immigrants
  •     Counted syllables --> holiday wishes . . .
  •     Where are you from?
  •     Writing to Learn -- try Haiku        

A counting rhyme, a riddle

     During the summer I had lots of activities with grandchildren -- they all love to read and one of the books we enjoyed together was Counting Rhymes (selected by Shona McKellar, a Dorling Kindersley book, 1993).  Here are a rhyme and a riddle from that collection.

Let's Send a Rocket     by Kit Patrickson

TEN, NINE, EIGHT,                                 We're counting each second,
SEVEN, SIX, FIVE . . .                             And soon it will boom!

We'll send up a rocket,                         Get ready for . . . TWO;
And it will be LIVE .                              Get ready to go . . .
        
FIVE, FOUR, THREE . . .                          It's TWO--and it's--ONE!  
It's ready to zoom!                                We're OFF!  It's ZERO!

                                    RIDDLE -- What animal do these clues describe?

                                    Four stiff-standers,
                                    Four dilly-danders,
                                    Two lookers,
                                    Two crookers,
                                    And a wig-wag.

Counting Groundhogs

     I grew up in a town about 25 miles from Punxsutawney, PA -- and Groundhog Day on February 2 was local-news only. This was the quiet time before television cameras mades stars of groundhogs and, back then, we knew them for their underground piracy as well as for their weather-forecasting.
     My father, a farmer, did not like groundhogs; he tried to keep them away from his fields by blocking their entrances to the networked burrows where they chewed the roots of crops planted overhead.  Fifty years after these farming days, I arrived at the following "what is this world coming to?" poem that features my mother and me watching groundhogs play in a field outside her sickroom. (The poem is, approximately, a sonnet -- in which the poet is not only counting groundhogs but also counting syllables . . ..)

Playing Hopscotch . . . and Counting . . .

      Growing up on a Pennsylvania farm gave me lots of opportunities to use mathematics -- counting sheep, choosing patterns for planting, and many kitchen tasks.  I also enjoyed occasional times to join friends at in-town playgrounds and, on their paved areas, hopscotch was one of our arithmetical and geometrical activities.  Recently I came across a wonderful online collection of poems by Maya Angelou (1928 - 2014) -- and, within it, this slightly mathy poem that includes hopscotch and also speaks of racial injustice:  

     Harlem Hopscotch    by Maya Angelou

     One foot down, then hop! It's hot.
     Good things for the ones that's got.
     Another jump, now to the left.
     Everybody for hisself.  

Reflections on the Transfinite

     Georg Cantor (1845-1918), a German mathematician, first dared to think the counter-intuitive notion that not all infinite sets have the same size--and then he proved it:  The set of all real numbers (including all of the decimal numbers representable on the number line) cannot be matched in a one-to-one pairing with the set of counting (or natural) numbers -- 1,2,3,4, . . . .   Sets whose elements can be matched one-to-one with the counting numbers are termed "countable" -- and Cantor's result showed that the set of all real numbers is uncountable.
     Cantor developed an extensive theory of transfinite numbers -- and poet (as well as philosopher and professor) Emily Grosholz reflects on these in a poem:

April: along with baseball we celebrate poetry and mathematics

Is it coincidence or design that

     April  is  National Poetry Month
            
           and

   April  is  Mathematics Awareness Month
          (This year's theme is  "mathematics and sports")

In my own reading, baseball is the sport for which I have found the most poetry.

Counting fingers and blackbirds

Love of numbers is common in childhood -- and traditional nursery rhymes offer chances to know numbers as playmates and friends.  "Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie . . . The king was in his counting house . . ." and so on.  In "The Story of the Ten Blackbirds" poet Millicent Accardi combines a portrait of an amazing story-telling aunt with a collage of childhood memories, counted and remembered.

   The Story of the Ten Blackbirds     by Millicent Borges Accardi

   Blended at times into
   The three little pigs
   Or the Catholic Saints.

Counting (with sadness) in Syria

Burmese poet ko ko thett is an activist-scholar and, at present, a resident of Vienna, Austria. I became acquainted with his work through Kyi May Kaung, a writer, artist, Burma-activist-scholar, and friend who currently lives in the Washington, DC area. Here is a poem by ko ko thett  -- for Syria.

the 5000th    by ko ko thett

                        for syria

Algebra cadabra

It was my good fortune to meet Colette Inez back in the early 1990s when she was poet-in-residence at Bucknell University. Then, as now, I was collecting poems-with-mathematics, and I have long loved this poem that weaves figuring into forests.

Forest Children     by Colette Inez

We heard swifts feeding in air,
sparrows ruffling dusty feathers,
a tapping on stones, mud, snow, pulp
when rain came down, the hiss of fire.
Counting bird eggs in a dome of twigs,
we heard trees fall and learned
to name them on a page for school. 

Counting on numbers

Alan Michael Parker's anthologized and highly regarded poem "Family Math" begins in the style of a typical word-problem from Algebra -- and continues with a weaving of the ways that numbers describe our lives.

Family Math     by Alan Michael Parker

I am more than half the age of my father,
who has lived more than twice as long
as his father, who died at thirty-six.

It starts with counting . . .

Mathematical imagery is one of the many features I enjoy in the work of Canadian environmental scientist and poet Madhur Anand.  Here is a sample from her new collection (A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes).
 

Background:  In an experiment designed to test the truth of a given statement 

(often called the null hypothesis), a Type I error occurs if the experiment results in a true hypothesis 
being rejected (a "false positive") and a Type II error occurs if a false hypothesis is accepted. 

Type One Error     by Madhur Anand

I avoid news, talk to strangers, walk around the block
a thousand times and toss nickels for random samples.
I still get a few false positives.  I'm fine.  It's good. 

HELLO, Numbers

     As a child, I learned to love numbers via counting rhymes (of which many are found at this Lit2Go website);  -- often I reinforced my number-memory by reciting  rhyming verses such as "One, two, buckle my shoe" and "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep" and enjoying the trick in "Going to St. Ives."  University of Arkansas mathematician Edmund Harriss (whom I met a bunch of years ago at a conference in Banff) and co-authors Houston Hughes (poet) and Brian Rea (visual artist) have a book -- HELLO NUMBERS! (published in 2020 by The Experiment).  This book, like those old rhymes, gives young readers the opportunity for fun with numbers as they learn.

Here's a sample:  

    Learning meets wonder
           when you invite numbers to come play in your imagination!

       First think of One peeking out from the night
       Like a point, or a dot, or a shimmering light.