Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Poems starring mathematicians - 5
Monday, May 3, 2021
Celebrate Math-Women -- Celebrate AWM
1 This
2 year's the
3 fiftieth
4 birthday of the
5 Association
6 for Women in Mathe-
7 matics. Join celebrations --
8 hear lectures, game with playing cards,
9 interview, write essays that feature
10 math women you admire. Speak up -- cheer girls
11 who do well in math class; look back, remember,
12 laud stars of the past -- support A W M.
The Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) is a national organization devoted to encouraging women and girls to study and to have active careers in the mathematical sciences, and to promote equal opportunity and the equal treatment of women and girls in the mathematical sciences. Founding in 1971 and celebrating math-women with outreach, networks and partnerships, playing cards, essay contest (for students in middle school through college) . . . and so much more.
Explore AWM's Website and their lively WOMEN DO MATH site.
Sunday, September 29, 2024
Complement and Compliment -- and Geometry
Poetry's special effects often come from the multiple meanings of terms used -- and today I offer a snip of a mathy item that I enjoyed and that plays with meaning -- an item I found a few days ago (September 19) on X (Twitter),
A posting by California math teacher Howie Hua |
And, looking back for geometry in earlier postings, here is a link to a prose poem posted in February, 2017 -- "The Geometry of Poetry" by Janet R. Kirchenheimer. Still another geometry reading opportunity is the baseball poem "Our Ballpark" by Le Hinton (sampled in this 2015 posting).
Friday, July 20, 2018
Counting insects, counting on them . . .
And so -- jet lagged yet continuing in my appreciation of the population-mathematics of insects -- I offer below a poem of bees by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), also found here. Another bee-poem by Dickinson posted back in August 2013 is available at this link.
The most important population (1746) by Emily Dickinson
The most important population
Unnoticed dwell,
They have a heaven each instant
Not any hell.
Their names, unless you know them,
'Twere useless tell.
Of bumble-bees and other nations
The grass is full.
An interesting Smithsonian article, "Bees May Understand Zero . . ." may be found here and the Washington POST has featured bees at this recent link and this earlier one.
Thursday, May 14, 2015
Sonnets from The Voyage of the Beagle
5 heartbeats each breath
A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to be part of a poetry reading that also featured Rick Mullin -- who serves science as an editor of the Chemical and Engineering News -- and whose latest poetry book is a collection of sonnets that offer a magical and musical retelling of Darwin's voyage -- in Sonnets from The Voyage of the Beagle (Dos Madres Press, 2014). Here are two selections from that collection -- the opening sonnet (first of a triptych) and a later one that features geometry of birds.
After Uranus by Rick Mullin
On reading Richard Holmes
I
There was an age when poetry and science
shared the province of discovery,
when Coleridge wished he's studied chemistry
and Humphry Davy, in exact defiance
of the Royal Society, blew things up.
Tuesday, November 11, 2014
In college she studied mathematics
At the website goodreads.com I found this mathy (and poetic) quote that I recognized as from the film:
Friday, September 15, 2017
Love Triangle . . ..
With White's permission, here is the poem -- offered with a preparatory remark: the poet is sometimes explicit as he describes the geometry of sexual attraction.
Love Triangle by Jerome A. White
A trio of three-sided polygons sprawled across
the two-dimensional space of my notebook page
capturing my singular focus
The one on the left I tried to seduce
Only to find her obliquely obtuse
Her oversized angle symbolic
of the diverging vectors our lives would follow
Sunday, March 30, 2014
Split This Rock 2014 was great!
Thursday, January 8, 2015
The Geometry of Winter, with Eagles
on Sunday, January 11 at Arlington's Iota Cafe.
for Phyllis
We spot them, first almost imaginary
thin pencil lines or scratches on our glasses.
The earth's disk flattens out
where this pale land becomes the bay,
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
Emily Dickinson
Dickinson is on my mind these recent days following my opportunity last Saturday evening to attend a session of a conference held by the Emily Dickinson International Society. A gracious invitation by Martha Nell Smith enabled me to attend a program that featured two long-time friends, actor Laurie McCants of the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble, performing a scene from her one-woman show, Industrious Angels, and Stephanie Strickland, a New York poet who, along with collaborator Nick Montfort, offered background and performance for Sea and Spar Between, a poetry generator that works with language patterns for these two writers.
Thursday, April 13, 2023
Seeing the World through a dual prism . . .
Based in Melbourne, Australia, Tom Petsinis is a mathematics adviser at Deakin University and is author of nine poetry collections as well as theatrical works and books of fiction. He also is involved in the worldwide BRIDGES organization --which meets annually to investigate and celebrate connections between mathematics and the arts. This year's BRIDGES conference will be held July 27-31 in Halifax, Nova Scotia and next year's conference is planned for August 1-5, 2024 at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia.
Below is "Zero" -- a mathy poem by Petsinis which is also offered as a sample at this BRIDGES link (a link that advertises and celebrates those poets participating in the 2022 conference).
Tuesday, July 14, 2015
Visual-mathematical poetry
"Winning" -- a visual poem by Kaz Maslanka in a form related to the formula for the area of a rectangle, A = lw or, alternatively, w = A/l. (Double-click on the image to enlarge it.) |
During July 29-August 1, 2015, Kaz Maslanka and I both plan to participate
in the BRIDGES Math-and-the-Arts Conference at the University of Baltimore --
sharing our poetry and enjoying the work of others.
Join us if you can; no registration fee is required for Friday "Family Day" events
which include a poetry reading.