Geometry of Love

     A couple of weeks ago my "Google Alert" linked me to a posting of a science poem concerning "the geometry of love."  The posting -- at The Finch and Pea -- is a poem that is both elegant and precise (and one that has been included in the anthology, Strange Attractors:  Poems of Love and Mathematics, that Sarah Glaz and I collected and edited several years ago).  Here it is:

The Definition of Love     by Andrew Marvell (England, 1621-1678)

My love is of a birth as rare
As ‘tis for object strange and high;
It was begotten by Despair
Upon Impossibility.  

Excitement from Finding a Proof . . . and then . . .

Recently I have been revisiting the poems that Sarah Glaz and I collected for the anthology, Strange Attractors:  Poems of Love and Mathematics (AK Peters / CRC Press, 2008) and renewing my enjoyment of them.  Here, from page 146, is  a sample.

The Proof by Theodore Deppe
 
I could live like this, waiting on the roof
for the great egret that flies overhead
at just this time, measuring the sun's height
with my fingers to see if the moment's come,
Annie studying the horizon as she describes
the last minutes of a show she watched
in which some mathematician -
she didn't catch the name - labours seven years
to solve a proof he's been enthralled by
since childhood, and though Annie tuned in
too late to know the nature of the problem,
she loves the pure joy with which he looks
into the camera and announces, I've found it -
there are tears in his eyes - I've found it.  

BRIDGES Conference 2022 -- Math-Poetry

      A couple of months ago (here in my June 8 posting) I offered a link to information about poetry to be offered at the 2022 Bridges Math-Arts Conference -- held last week in Finland.  This link leads to a series of YouTube recordings of Bridges mathy poems and this link (at the website of organizer Sarah Glaz) offers written information about Bridges poets as well as sample poems.  Visit, read and listen, learn, enjoy!

     One of my poems that is included on the Bridges poetry site is entitled "Three-fold Asylum" -- a poem that explores various roles of the number three.  I offer it below:

     Three-fold Asylum     by JoAnne Growney

     Third door left on level three, my room
     holds steel furniture—its items three:
     double platform bed (for dreamless sleep),

     square corner desk with three-castered chair
     that spins, loops, and glides from the barred door
     to the dark window that sees nowhere.

A CENTO from BRIDGES 2017 Poets

     A cento is a literary work made from quotations from other works -- most often it is a poem, assembled from lines by other poets.    Below I have created a cento from lines written by the poets who have been invited to participate in the July 30 Poetry Reading at the 2017 Bridges Math-Arts Conference in Waterloo, Ontario.  A wonderful program is planned -- it's not too late to register and join us.

       All is number,      mysterious proportions             
       Like Egyptians      burying gold with the dead       
       Golden Fear                    
       that divides and leaves     no remainder   

Coleridge: A Mathematical Problem

 "A Mathematical Problem" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) -- found online at Elite Skills Classics -- uses verse to describe construction of an equilateral triangle; Coleridge introduces the poem with a letter to his brother telling of his admiration of mathematics, a view rather rare among poets.   

Poetry with Mathematics -- Anthologies

More than thirty years ago at a mathematics conference book exhibit I stumbled upon Against Infinity:  An Anthology of Contemporary Mathematical Poetry, edited by Ernest Robson and Jet Wimp.  This collection, now out of print, became a resource for my mathematics courses--an opportunity for students to see the links between mathematics and the surrounding world.   One of my early loves was "Arithmetic Lesson:  Infinity" by Linda Pastan.  Found also in Carnival Evening, the poem opens with these these lines:

Poetry inspired by Chaos

Poet Robin Chapman studies the language learning of children -- and has collaborated with physics professor Julien Sprott on a lovely and fascinating collection The Art and Poetry of Chaos:  Images from a Complex World (World Scientific, 2005).  In the following poem Chapman offers (as she does throughout the poetry of the collection) a human interpretation of technical terminology.  

Dimensions of a soul

In the poem below, Young Smith uses carefully precise terms of Euclidean geometry to create a vivid interior portrait.

     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. 

Action at a distance

One of the great things about writing this blog is the people who have -- out of the blue and across the miles -- sent along a great poem or tidbit.  One of the valuable contributors is Tim Love, a British computer guy and poet -- and also a blogger (at LitRefs). The mysterious concept of "Action at a Distance" drives this Love poem:

Number personalities

In his collection, Zero, Scottish poet Brian McCabe raises questions about numerical classifications.  He begins "The Fifth Season" with "Everyone talks of the four / -- none speak of the fifth." Another poem, "The Seventh Sense, " moves from a similar beginning " . . . none speak of the seventh" into a dreamy apprehension of the magical possibilities of items not yet classified. The following selection from Zero, "Triskaidekaphobia," offers remedies for the fear of bad luck brought by 13. 

Dividing by Zero

Fairy godmothers have their magic wands and mathematician have division by zero as a way to make the impossible happen -- for example, we can show that 2 equals 3:

Loving a mathematician (Valentine's Day and . . . )

A perfect way to celebrate Valentine's Day -- especially for you who enjoy mathematics --  read (aloud and to each other) some "poems of love and mathematics." Such is easily possible, for the anthology, Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics (A K Peters, 2008), edited by Sarah Glaz and me, contains words on the topic by more than 150 poetic voices.  

Poems starring mathematicians

      One of the challenges posed by a multi-year blog is locating interesting old posts.  One of  my frequent early topics was "poems starring mathematicians" and I offer links to several of these from 2011 below:
     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.

She had a way with numbers

In Letters from a Floating World, artist and poet Siv Cedering (1939-2007) has given us a poignant portrait of astronomer (and math-woman) Caroline Herschel:
 
Letter from Caroline Herschel (1750-1848)     by Siv Cedering

William is away, and I am minding

the heavens. I have discovered

eight new comets and three nebulae

never before seen by man,

and I am preparing an Index to

Flamsteed's observations, together with

a catalogue of 560 stars omitted from

the British Catalogue, plus a list of errata

in that publication. William says 

New issue -- Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

     The online, open-access Journal of Humanistic Mathematics (JHM) publishes new issues twice each year -- and the first issue for 2022 is now available and is rich with math-poetry offerings.  One of the fun items is a folder of Fibs, featuring contributions (with email contact information) from:

Tatiana Bonch-Osmolovskaya, Gerd Asta Bones, Robin Chapman,
Marian Christie, Marion Deutsche Cohen, Stephen Day,
Carol Dorf, Susan Gerofsky, Sarah Glaz,
David Greenslade, Emily Grosholz, JoAnne Growney,
Kate Jones, Gizem Karaali, Lisa Lajeunesse,
Cindy Lawrence, Larry Lesser, Alice Major,
Kaz Maslanka, Dan May, Bjoern Muetzel,
Mike Naylor, Doug Norton, Eveline Pye,
Jacob Richardson, S. Brackett Robertson,
Stephanie Strickland, Susana Sulic,
Connie Tettenborn, Racheli Yovel.

And the current JHM issue contains five more poems -- thoughtful and thought-provoking: "What's So Great About Non-Orientable Manifolds?" by Michael McCormick, "Wrong Way" by Joseph Chaney, "The Solipsist’s First Paper" by Sabrina Sixta, "Heuristic or Stochastic?" by E Laura Golberg, and "So Long My Friend" by Bryan McNair.

In closing, I offer here a sample from the folder of Fibs, this one written by Gizem Karaali, one of the editors of JHM.

               Where does math come from?
                         If
                         You
                         Want to
                         Do some math,
                         Dive into the depths
                         Of your mind, climb heights of your soul.

Thank you, Gizem Karaali, for your work in humanizing mathematics!

Crocheting mathematics

Charlotte Henderson majored in mathematics and English at Wellesley College and has applied her dual interests as an editor for A K Peters, Ltd (a science and technology publisher that is now part of CRC Press).  Several manuscripts on which she has worked at A K Peters have drawn her to the connections between mathematics and art, including needlework. She is particularly interested in the diverse possibilities of crochet, which she learned after working on Daina Taimina's book, Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes.   Charlotte has turned this interest into art and into a poem: 

Celebrate 3.14 with poems of Pi

     Soon this year's version of the date 3.14 will arrive.  Pi-day!
     At the 2012 Bridges Conference in Towson MD I had the opportunity to hear "Art of π," a presentation by Tatiana Bonch-Osmolovskaya that told of ways that the special number π has inspired artists and writers.  This blog has previously celebrated π -- for example on 6 September 2010 (featuring work by Kate Bush,  Robert Morgan and Wislawa Szymborska),  10 September 2010 (mnemonics for π, especially from Mike Keith) , 15 March, 2011,(a poem by Lana Hechtman Ayers)  27 November 2011 (a poem by Brian McCabe). 

Chaos theory -- portrayed in poetry

     A poem I have long loved is "Chaos Theory" by poet (and fiction writer and scholar) Ronald Wallace -- and he has given me permission to offer it below.

Chaos Theory     by Ronald Wallace

    1. Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions

       For want of a nail the shoe was lost,
       for want of a shoe the horse was lost,
       and so on to the ultimate loss—a battle,
       a world. In other words, the breeze
       from this butterfly's golden wings
       could fan a tsunami in Indonesia
       or send a small chill across the neck 
       of an old love about to collapse in Kansas
       in an alcoholic stupor—her last.
       Everything is connected. Blame it on
       the butterfly, if you will. Or the gesture
       thirty years ago, the glance across
       the ninth-grade auditorium floor,   

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics

      Daniel May -- professor at Black Hills State University in South Dakota -- enjoys not only teaching mathematics to future teachers but also exploration of the combinatorics of card games and the poetry of mathematical patterns and ideas.   He spends his summers working with Bridge to Enter Advanced Mathematics (BEAM), a mathematics enrichment program for under-served public middle school students in New York City and Los Angeles.

     Below I offer a poem by May that was part of the program at the recent BRIDGES Conference.  (May's poem also is found with lots of BRIDGES poetry and poet-information here at the website of Sarah Glaz.)

          Eight Minutes     by Daniel May

          Eyelids closed,
          warm
          sunlight shining

          bright

          onto my thin skin.
          Earth below me, lush and vibrant from
          our star's
          nearly infinite rays.

Applied Mathematics -- in Spoken Word Poetry

     Lots of mathy poems are available on YouTube -- for example, recordings by poetry participants in Bridges Math-Arts conferences are available;  here is a link to a webpage (maintained by Sarah Glaz) for 2022 Bridges poets and poems .  Today I have been fascinated by and want to share some words from an Applied Mathematics YouTube video by spoken word poet Dan Simpson, a UK writer, performer, producer, and educator.  A few lines from the poem appear below, followed by a link to the video performance.

I love the curvature of your wave form the way you deviate from the norm .  . .  when we touch it's an electric storm . . .  if you were described by numbers they would all be trying this but like Heisenberg you're uncertain  . . .  this verse is in a language that you can understand bringing maths and poetry together in double helix sounds . . .  statistically speaking I'll make you laugh sooner or later . . .

     Dan Simpson's complete and very entertaining YouTube performance of Applied Mathematics is available here.  Other mentions in this blog of Dan's poem and other YouTube recordings may be found at this link.