Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Rhyme, beauty, and usefulness
Friday, April 9, 2010
April: along with baseball we celebrate poetry and mathematics
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.
Saturday, April 25, 2015
Geometry of baseball
Today I feature the opening stanza from a baseball poem by Pennsylvania poet, Le Hinton.
from Our Ballpark by Le Hinton
This is the place where my father educated us:
an open-air school of tutelage and transformation.
This is where we first learned
to count to three, then later to calculate the angle
of a line drive bouncing off the left field wall.
We studied the geometry and appreciated the ballet
of third to second to first, a triple play.
. . .
Friday, October 13, 2017
Mathy Double Dactyls
The verses below are by Arthur Seiken, Emeritus Professor at Union College and I found them (with the help of editor Marjorie Senechal) in a 1995 issue of The Mathematical Intelligencer (Vol 17, No 2, p 11).
If you want to see more of this poetic form, here are links to follow: "Mathematical Double Dactyls" by Tristan Miller from the July 2015 issue of the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics and the Higgeldy Piggeldy verse collection of Robin Pemantle. And, again, here is a Wikipedia link that supplies formal details of these verses.
Monday, March 26, 2012
Poems with Numbers
Thursday, July 5, 2018
A proof in limericks
Retired Arkansas law professor (and former math teacher) Robert Laurence has fun with this pair of transcendentals using limerick stanzas. Get out your pencil and graph paper -- and enjoy puzzling through his rhymes.
Monday, July 12, 2021
Limericks about Graphs -- Prize-Winners
A couple of weeks ago I posted information about prize-winning poetry in the Writing portion of the 2021 MoMath Steven Strogatz Contest for high school students. After finding that I began to look for the results of earlier contests. Apparently 2020 was the first year of these contests and in that year, also, poems were winners -- limericks (with related drawings) by Sarah Thau. “Limericks and poetry are not a typical way to convey information about
math,” admits Thau, “but I think it makes it more palatable than
learning functions by rote. Who doesn’t love a limerick?”
From her winning collection, entitled "Little Function Limericks," here is a sample of Thau's work:
The entire collection of Thau's limericks is found here. |
Sunday, July 8, 2012
What are the chances?
Monday, February 13, 2023
Happy Valentine's Day
A perfect way for math-poetry fans to celebrate Valentine's Day is to visit the anthology, Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics (AK Peters/CRC Pres, 2008), edited by Sarah Glaz and me. Here is a sample from that collection, a limerick;
There Was a Young Maiden by Bob Kurosaka*
There was a young maiden named Lizt
Whose mouth had a funny half-twist.
She'd turned both her lips
Into Mobius strips . . .
'Til she's kissed you, you haven't been kissed!
*Of Japanese heritage, Kurosaka was born in Lake George, NW -- he became a college teacher and author of science fiction and limericks.
Here is a link to previous Valentine-related postings:
this link leads to blog-search results for "Strange Attractors."
Saturday, February 9, 2013
Limericks and a Cardioid -- for Valentine's Day
in a calculus book --
a cardioid is the heart-sign.
Thursday, January 2, 2014
2013 (and prior) -- titles, dates of posts
Dec 30 Error Message Haiku
Dec 26 The angel of numbers . . .
Dec 23 Ah, you are a mathematician
Dec 20 Measuring Winter
Wednesday, May 31, 2023
Choosing the GEOMETRIC SHAPE of a poem
Structural constraints often govern the patterns we find in poetry -- well-known in poetic history are rhythm-and-rhyme patterns including the sonnet and the villanelle and the limerick, and the syllable-counting pattern of some Haiku. Because many poems were shared orally, rather than in writing, patterns of counting and sound helped to ease the challenges of remembering.
For me a wonderful source for learning about new poetic forms is the blog of poet Marian Christie -- a writer and scholar, born in Zimbawe and now living in England , who has studied and taught both mathematics and poetry. In her very fine blog, Poetry and Mathematics, found here, Christie explores many of the influences that mathematics can have on poetry -- including, here in a recent posting, some effects transmitted by the SHAPE of a poem.
Wednesday, January 8, 2020
Browse Math-Poetry Links . . .
- TITLES OF POSTS (with links)
- January, 2020
- December, 2019
Thursday, August 22, 2013
Out of 100 -- in the Klondike Gold Rush
Join the project: submit limerick definitions of (math) terms for OEDILF consideration.
One of my favorite poets is the 1996 Nobelist Wislawa Szymborska (1923 - 2012, Poland); one of my favorites of her poems is "A Contribution to Statistics." Szymborska's poem served as a model for a poem of mine shown below, about Gold Rush Days in Skagway, Alaska. Written while I was poet-in-residence at Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park, (in Skagway), this poem draws on historical data from the park's library to paint a bleak picture of wealth and survival in those gold-mad days.
Counting in the Klondike by JoAnne Growney
after Wisława Szymborska
Of 100 who left Seattle for Skagway in 1898
40 made it to the gold fields
8 found gold.
Wednesday, January 14, 2015
To add two and two
There was an old man who said, "Do
Tell me how I'm to add two and two?
I'm not very sure
That it doesn't make four --
But I fear that is almost too few."