Sunday, March 10, 2013
Celebrate 3.14 with poems of Pi
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).
Thursday, August 5, 2010
Snowballs -- growing/shrinking lines
Friday, October 12, 2018
The music of twelve tones -- in poems
The poem consists of 12 lines, divided into couplets.
Each couplet contains 12 syllables, using the natural cadence of speech.
The accented sounds of the words are considered tones.
Only 12 tones are used throughout the poem, repeated various times.
As a result, the poem achieves a rare harmony that is purely lyrical,
enriching its imagery and meaning
The following poem is on my shelf in Memory Is No Stranger (Ohio Univ. Press, 1981), a collection of Bartlett's twelve-tone poems; it also is found in the math-poetry anthology Against Infinity (Primary Press, 1979).
The Infinite Present by Elizabeth Bartlett
Because I longed
to comprehend the infinite
Saturday, January 23, 2016
Not good at math . . .
Humility by Joan L. Cannon
Archetypes, mysteries, simple clues
that only fingers and toes, sticks and stones
and flashes of inspiration require
for universes to be disclosed ...
symbols for functions and formulae
for proof; logic so easy for some —
why am I innumerate?
Tuesday, June 17, 2014
Found: Elementary Calculus
Found by Karen Solie
Elementary Calculus
From Elementary Calculus A. Keith and W. J. Donaldson.
Glasgow: Gibson, 1960.
Speed (like distance)
is a magnitude and has no
direction; velocity (like displacement)
has magnitude and direction.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Counting rhymes -- Catalan, Bell numbers
Wednesday, July 17, 2019
An Ode to Mathematics
I love poetry too so much and I believe poetry can be used as a means of making students love and develop interest in mathematics. As teachers of this beautiful subject we face a lot of challenges to make students perceive maths as easy and down to earth.
Ivota also has shared several poems with me; here is one of them:
An Ode to Mathematics by Foteck Ivota
Your merits, maths, many may miss
And in ignorance may dismiss
Marvelous Maths that is life,
Believing that all is strife.
Chorus:
Maths for you and Maths for me,
Maths, Maths and Maths for all,
Maths, Maths for everything.
Monday, October 8, 2018
A special Fibonacci poem
Pathways by Marian Christie
–
O
I
am
not
going
anywhere
unaccompanied
by life’s patterns: a whorl
in a pinecone, branches on oak or elm trees,
the petal count of a daisy, the helix at the heart of a chrysanthemum,
the shell of a nautilus swimming in the ocean. A sequence hides in the shape of
probabilities, and in my own DNA.
Poet's Note: In this poem the number of letters per line is determined by the Fibonacci sequence: the first line has zero letters while the last line, representing the twelfth number in the sequence, contains 89 letters. In addition, the letters of each word add up to a Fibonacci number.
Friday, May 24, 2024
Haiku in Math Class
One of my recent discoveries of math-poetry is in the activities of Hofstra University professor Johanna Franklin, Franklin asks her students to compose Haiku and she has recently sent me the following material from various courses and semesters:
Math equals patterns
patterns not everyone sees
patterns we all need.
(introduction
to proofs, Spring 2023)
Why do I have my math students write haikus at the end of the semester? Because I love both poetry and playing with words, and the American conception of a haiku strikes me as a perfect poem for a mathematician: the counting of syllables, the symmetry.
Thursday, December 8, 2011
Monsieur Probabilty
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Queneau and the Oulipo
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
More statistics -- from Hiawatha
Hiawatha Designs an Experiment by Maurice Kendall
Hiawatha, mighty hunter
He could shoot ten arrows upwards
Shoot them with such strength and swiftness
That the last had left the bowstring
Ere the first to earth descended.
This was commonly regarded
As a feat of skill and cunning.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Bridges in Coimbra
Newton's binomial is as beautiful as Venus de Milo.
What happens is that few people notice it.
-- Fernando Pessoa (as Álvaro de Campos) (1888-1935)
translated from the Portuguese by Francisco Craveiro
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Digital poetry -- Stephanie Strickland et al
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, October 8, 2014
Love Physics
Love Physics by Richard Retecki
equal forces
oppositely directed
canceled to zero
then we tricked you
exchanging pressure for light
Tuesday, September 29, 2020
TalkingWriting with Mathematics
TalkingWriting is an online journal that's celebrating its 10th birthday -- TEN YEARS of including mathematics in its mix of poetry. This mathy connection has grown strong through the poetry editorship of Carol Dorf, poet and retired math teacher. In this anniversary issue, poems are paired with works of visual art and the effect is stunning; from it, I offer below samples of poems by Amy Uyematsu and by me.
Amy Uyematsu's poem "Lunes During This Pandemic" thoughtfully applies
the counting structure of the "lune" (aka "American Haiku") with
three-line stanzas of 3/5/3 words per line.
Friday, September 2, 2011
Two ways to compute 1/3
Wednesday, February 7, 2018
Find a Mathy Valentine!
Two of the poems in the anthology that Sarah Glaz and I edited -- Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics (AK Peters/CRC Press, 2008) -- have the title "Valentine." Here is the final line of the one by Katharine O'Brien:
. . . won't you be my cardioid?
and the final pair of lines of Michael Stueben's verse:
I love you as one over x,
as x approaches zero.
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
From 2011 -- dates, titles of posts
Scrolling through the 12 months of titles below may lead you to topics and poets/poems of interest. Also helpful may be the SEARCH box at the top of the right-hand column; there you may enter names or terms that you would like to find herein.
Dec 30 Good Numbers
Dec 26 A mathematical woman
Dec 22 Counting on Christmas
Dec 20 Thoughts Suggested by a College Examination
Dec 17 Ruth Stone counts
Dec 14 A puzzle with a partial solution
Dec 11 Poetry captures math student
Dec 8 Monsieur Probabilty
Dec 5 Poetic Pascal Triangle
Dec 2 Mathematics works with witchcraft