Generating a sonnet -- human vs computer

     News last month from UC Berkeley's School of Information described a computer that writes poetry. In particular, it writes sonnets.  This article describes in much detail the creation of several sonnet stanzas.  This link offers the winner in Dartmouth's 2016 PoetiX sonnet-generation competition -- in which Berkeley earned a second.  Here, from an article in Slate, is an example of what Berkeley's generator produced:

    Kindred pens my path lies where a flock of
    feast in natures mysteries an adept
    you are my songs my soft skies shine above
    love after my restless eyes I have kept.  

A sonnet for W.R.Hamilton

      Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton (1805-1865) was also a poet (see, for example, this sonnet in a prior posting (13 October 2011).  Irish poet and physicist Iggy McGovern has written A Mystic Dream of 4:  A sonnet sequence based on the life of William Rowan Hamilton (Quaternia Press, 2013). 

The collection is prefaced by this quote from Hamilton:

"The quaternion [was] born, 

as a curious offspring of a quaternion of parents, 

say of geometry, algebra, metaphysics, and poetry."

Here is McGovern's opening sonnet.

GEOMETRY     by Iggy McGovern

Once, any pupil could define me best:
"points, lines, angles and figures", could amuse
The table with the Christmas cracker jest
About 'the squaw' on the hypotenuse! 

Sonnet for Bolyai -- and translations

     The Hungarian mathematician János Bolyai (1802 – 1860) was one of the discoverers of non-Euclidean geometry — an axiomatization  that differs from Euclid's geometry in its stipulations concerning parallel lines. This discovery of  an alternative view of space -- that also was logically consistent -- helped to free mathematicians to explore new ideas, and the consequences developed by Einstein and others have led to far-reaching results.
     Hungarian poet Mihály Babits (1883-1941) wrote a sonnet about Bolyai.  I learned of this sonnet and its English translation (by Paul Sohar and offered below) from Osmo Pekonen, a Finnish mathematician who is engaged in the project of collecting translations of Babits' sonnet into as many languages as possible.  (The original Hungarian version -- along with a Spanish translation -- is available here.) 

     Bolyai      by Mihály Babits              translation into English by Paul Sohar

     God had imprisoned our minds in space.
     Those puny things have remained prisoners.
     Thought, the hungry bird of prey fought the curse,
     but never breached its diamond bars' embrace.  

A Sonnet by William Rowan Hamilton

     Despite their similar lifespans, it is said that British mathematicians William Rowan Hamilton (1805-1865) and George Boole (1815-1864) had no significant interactions; however, both wrote poetry.  Back in my posting on 9/12/2022, I offered a sonnet by Boole.   Below, a sonnet by Hamilton -- found, along with a rich supply of poetry and science, at this MIT website.

A sonnet by William Rowan Hamilton

 

 

Struggling to create -- slave and master . . .

      In the sonnet below, Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) speaks of the enslavement of a writer of poetry in the effort to explain ideas in a perfect form . . . an enslavement perhaps (or not) also shared by mathematicians.     Food for thought!

       SONNET     by Edward Arlington Robinson

       The master and the slave go hand in hand,
       Though touch be lost.  The poet is a slave,
       And there be kings do sorrowfully crave
       The joyance that a scullion may command.
       But, ah, the sonnet-slave must understand
       The mission of his bondage, or the grave
       May clasp his bones, or ever he shall save,
       The perfect word that is the poet's wand.

       The sonnet is a crown, whereof the rhymes
       Are for Thought's purest god the jewel-stones;
       But shapes and echoes that are never done
       Will haunt the workshop, as regret sometimes
       Will bring with human yearning to sad thrones
       The crash of battles that are never won.

From Robinson's COLLECTED POEMS:  THE CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT, CAPTAIN CRAIG (Macmillan, New York, 1915)

The Irrational Sonnet -- An Oulipian form

An irrational sonnet has 14 lines, just as the traditional sonnet, but differs in its stanza-division and rhyme:  there are five stanzas--containing 3, 1, 4, 1 and 5 lines, respectively (these being the first five digits of the irrational number pi), and a rhyme scheme of   AAB  C  BAAB  C  CDCCD.  This form was devised by Oulipo member Jacques Bens (1931-2001) in 1963.   (Previous postings concerning the Oulipo occurred on March 25 and August 5.) 

December 2016 (and prior) -- titles, dates of posts

Here are the titles and dates of previous blog postings,

moving backward from the present.

For mathy poems related to a particular mathy topic -- such as women in math or climate or triangle or circle or teacher or . . . -- click on a selected title below or enter the desired term in the SEARCH box in the right-hand column.  For example, here is a link to a selection of poems found using the pair of search terms "women  equal."  For poems about calculus, follow this link.  To find a list of useful search terms, scroll down the right-hand column. 

     Dec 31  Happy New Year! -- Resolve to REWARD WOMEN!
     Dec 27  Celebrate Vera Rubin -- a WOMAN of science!
     Dec 26  Post-Christmas reflections from W. H. Auden
     Dec 19  Numbers for Christmas . . .
     Dec 15  Remembering Thomas Schelling (1921-2016)
     Dec 12  When one isn't enough ... words from a Cuban poet

Math-Stat Awareness Month -- find a poem!

APRIL is Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month
AND
National Poetry Month!

 Celebrate with a MATHY POEM, found here in this blog!  Scroll down!

If you are looking for mathy poems on a particular topic, the SEARCH box in the right-column may help you find them. For example, here is a link to posts found when I searched using the term "parallel."  And here are posts that include the term "angle."   To find a list of additional useful search terms, scroll down the right-hand column. 

For your browsing pleasure, here are the titles and dates of previous blog postings,

moving backward from the present.  Enjoy!

Mar 31  Math and poetry in film
Mar 28  Split this Rock, Freedom Plow Award, April 21
Mar 27  Math-themed poems at Poets.org
Mar 23  Remember Emmy Noether! 

Irish poet McGovern to visit US

     Irish poet and physicist Iggy McGovern will visit the US in October and is scheduled to read at 

The Writer's Center in Bethesda--Saturday, October 14 at 3 PM.  

McGovern's poetry has been featured earlier in this blog -- including "Belfast Inequalities" and "Proverbs for the Computer Age" on December 20, 2015  and "Geometry" on January 12, 2016.  This latter poem, "Geometry" is the opening poem in A Mystic Dream of 4 (Dedalus Press, Dublin, 2013) -- a sonnet sequence based on the life of mathematician William Rowan Hamilton (1805-1865).  Also a poet, Hamilton grew up in Ireland in a time of prominence for British romantic poets of William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) -- and I offer below a McGovern sonnet that links Hamilton to Coleridge.     

Sonnet -- To Science

Edgar Allan Poe's "Sonnet -- To Science" was the "Poem-A-Day" selection of poets.org last week on September 29.  The poem is in the public domain and I offer it to you below. As Poe speaks of science I wonder whether -- if he had not announced his subject -- we might as easily imagine he is speaking of poetry. 

Ideal Geometry -- complex politics

Christopher Morley (1890-1957) was an American poet, novelist, and publisher who was the son of a poet and musician (Lilian Janet Bird) and a mathematics professor (Frank Morley) at Haverford College. His "Sonnet by a Geometer," below, is written in the voice of a circle and compares mathematical perfection with human imperfection.  For us who read the poem 90 years after its writing, Morley's phrase in line 13 -- "They talk of 14 points" -- is puzzling at first.

Write to learn ... follow constraints ... find poems

     Some people (myself included) take lots of notes during a lecture or other program -- for it seems that the physical activity of placing the words on the page is part of the process of installing the ideas in memory.  For me, also, the creation of a paragraph or a poem depends on the teamwork of hands and brain.

     One of the ways that poets engage themselves in creating new thoughts is by accepting the guidance of formal constraints -- creating the fourteen lines of a sonnet or the nineteen lines of a villanelle with strict patterns of rhythm and rhyme and repetition.  Below I consider the question of what I want for my birthday  --  and use that in my struggle to write a sonnet:

You asked me
      for a birthday gift suggestion . . .  by JoAnne Growney    

Blog history -- title, links for previous posts . . .

      My first posting in this blog was nearly eight years ago (on March 23, 2010).  If, at the time, I had anticipated its duration, I should have made a plan for organizing the posts.  But my ambitions were small.  During the time I was teaching mathematics at Bloomsburg University, I gathered poetry (and various historical materials) for assigned readings to enrich the students' course experiences. After my retirement, I had time to want to share these materials -- others were doing well at making historical material accessible to students but I thought poetry linked to mathematics needed to be shared more.  And so, with my posting of a poem I had written long ago celebrating the mathematical life of Emmy Noether, this blog began.  Particular topics featured often in postings include -- verse that celebrate women, verses that speak out against discrimination, verses that worry about climate change.   

You're invited to:
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.

                                       2017 Posts

Another Fibonacci poem . . .

     Through many years of the history of poetry, the sonnet has been a treasured form -- as poets strive carefully to match the iambic pentameter rhythm and some pattern of rhyme, this concentrated thinking leads to careful word choices and memorable poems.  (Here is a link to a mathy sonnet by a math teacher's son, John Updike.)
     Modern poetry has many "free verse" poems that follow no particular form AND ALSO a variety of new forms.  One particularly popular format (appearing often in this blog) is to count syllables-per-line using the Fibonacci numbers   Here an interesting example by poet Marian Christie which describes increasing complexities of crocheting using Fibonacci syllable-counts.

"Crochet" -- a FIB by Marian Christie

 Christie's poem was first published in here in Issue 36 of The Fib Review.

Sonnet for a geometry teacher

Wisconsin poet Ronald Wallace has fun with math-words in the following sonnet that celebrates a teacher of plane geometry. 

Jordie Albiston -- structure behind the writing

       I love sonnets and the one below by Jordie Albiston is a favorite of mine.
     Albiston is an Australian poet with a sense of orchestration learned from music.  Her collection, The Sonnet According to 'M' recently won the New South Wales literary award.  In her words: 

A sonnet with numbers

     Sonnet: Now I see them    by Michael Palmer

          Now I see them sitting me before a mirror.
          There’s noise and laughter. Somebody
          mentions that hearing is silver
          before we move on to Table One
          with the random numbers. I look down
          a long street containing numbers.

The Poetry of Mathematician George Boole

      One of the interesting poetry collections on my shelves is The Poetry of George Boole by Desmond MacHale (Logic Press, Ireland, 2020 -- and published in the USA for Logic Press by Lulu.com).  This is not simply a poetry collection -- but poetry with commentary.  MacHale includes more than seventy surviving poems by the Irish mathematician Boole (1815-1864) -- and he also discusses Boole's views of the connections between Science and the Arts with an initial chapter is entitled "Poetry and Mathematics."  

     It is quite appropriate that Boole should relate poetry to mathematics since he was, primarily, a mathematician; his Boolean algebra is basic to the design of digital computer circuits)   Boole's own poetry, however, found most of its inspiration outside of math.  Here is his Sonnet 20 (Sonnet to the Number Three); written in May 1846 and suggesting that belief in the religious Trinity is connected with our interpretation of space in three dimensions.

What is beauty? Is mathematics beautiful?

     My thoughts have been turned to the beauty of mathematics by stumbling onto a very fine article, "Beauty Bare: The Sonnet Form, Geometry and Aesthetics," by Matthew Chiasson and Janine Rogers -- published in 2009 in the Journal of Literature and Science and available online here.
      The article opens with this quote from A Mathematician's Apology (see p. 14) by G. H. Hardy:       Beauty is the first test:  there is no permanent place 
                                                   in the world for ugly mathematics.

Today I'm puzzling over what "beauty" means . . .   

Hyperbolic effects

Last month I went to the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef Exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History -- for a photo scroll down to the end of this post -- and that visit provoked me to begin searching for the term "hyperbolic" in poems.   I came close when I found "hyperbola" in a poem by Jonathan Holden and hyperbole in a sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning: