Honoring Math Teacher and Poet, Amy Uyematsu

      On Saturday, March 23 at 2 PM, a poetry-event is planned at Descanso Gardens in La Cañada Flintridge, California to celebrate the life of poet, math teacher, and activist Amy Uyematsu (1947-2023).  It was my pleasure to be connected to Amy via various math-related events and her work has been included in previous postings in this blog.  (Here's a link to a list of those earlier posts.)

     One of my favorite poems of Amy's is  "The Meaning of Zero:  A Love Poem."  The complete poem is found here at Poets. org and in the collection Strange Attractors:  Poems of Love and Mathematics-- and I offer its opening stanzas below.

Uyematsu's complete poem is available at this link.

"Countless" -- a Scrabblegram poem

     At the website X (Twitter) one of my frequent enjoyments is a Scrabblegram posting by David Cohen, writer from Atlanta, Georgia.  Cohen writes stanzas -- often poetic --  that use each of the 100 tiles in a Scrabble game exactly once.  More than a year ago, alerted by blogger and poet Marian Christie, I found and shared a mathy Scrabblegram ZERO at this link.  And here is another, Countless, found at here Cohen's website.

Scrabblegram by David Cohen (lots more here)

This link leads to a long list of Scrabblegrams!  And some of them are mathy!

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). 

Snowballs -- growing/shrinking lines

Today's post explores poetic structures called snowballs developed by the Oulipo (see also March 25 posting) and known to many through the writings of Scientific American columnist Martin Gardner (1914-2010).  TIME Magazine's issue for January 10, 1977 had an article entitled "Science:  Perverbs and Snowballs" that celebrated both Gardner and the inventive structures of the Oulipo. Oulipian Harry Mathews' "Liminal Poem" (to the right) is a snowball (growing and then melting) dedicated to Gardner.  The lines in Mathew's poem increase or decrease by one letter from line to line.   Below left, a poem by John Newman illustrates the growth-only snowball.

The music of twelve tones -- in poems

     Inspired by the musical composition strategy twelve-tone technique -- devised by Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg (1974-1951), in which all 12 notes of the chromatic scale are sound as often as one another in a piece of music -- American poet Elizabeth Bartlett (1911-1994) has developed the twelve-tone poem.  In Bartlett's words:
       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  

Not good at math . . .

     Connecticut poet Joan Cannon is a senior who laments her lingering anxiety over mathematics in her poem, "Humility," below.  I found Cannon's poem on Senior Women Web and it is accompanied there by selections from an article by Patrick Bahls entitled "Math and Metaphor:  Using Poetry to Teach Mathematics."  The complete article is available here.

     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?  

Found: Elementary Calculus

Here is a poem by Saskatchewan poet Karen Solie.

       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.  

Collections of Mathy Poetry

    My friend and colleague, Marian Christie, has let me know that the math-poetry collection (with commentary) that she published in 2021 -- From Fibs to Fractals: Exploring Mathematical Forms in Poetry -- is now available for free download on her website. Here is the link for downloading.   AND, this link leads to samples of Christie's own mathy poems. published earlier in her blog.

      Today I have been browsing From Fibs to Fractals.  In an entertaining and informative chat in Christie's opening chapter about the Fibonacci numbers, I encountered this sample, a six-line syllable-count Fib poem by contemporary American poet B. A. France:

       Looking     by B. A. France

               moon
               light
               rising
               above the
               skeletal treetops
               she wonders what tomorrow brings   

Counting rhymes -- Catalan, Bell numbers

     In mathematics, the Catalan numbers (named for Belgian mathematician Eugène Charles Catalan, 1814–1894, and beginning with 1, 1, 2, 5, 14, 42, 132, 429, . . . ) and the Bell numbers (named for the Scottish mathematician Eric Temple Bell, 1883-1960, and beginning with 1, 1, 2, 5, 15, 52, 203, 877,  . . . ),  provide answers to a variety of mathematical counting-problems, including counting the number of rhyme schemes for stanzas of poetry.  In English, earliest classification of rhyme schemes dates back to George Puttenham and his treatise, The Arte of English Poesie (published around 1590). 

An Ode to Mathematics

     One of the math-poets that I have met through this blog is Foteck Ivota, a mathematics teacher in the Cameroon.  In an email message, Ivota has offered this point of view:
       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.    

A special Fibonacci poem

     A recent email from Marian Christie -- a nominally retired mathematics teacher from Aberdeenshire  -- alerted me to her very special sort of Fibonacci poem, one in which the number of letters-per-line follows the Fibonacci numbers AND the length of each word is a Fibonacci number AND the poem speaks about the objects counted by these Fibonacci numbers.

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.  

Christie's poem was first published on the UK-based website IndependentVariable.

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.

Monsieur Probabilty

In recent months, I have encountered a variety of poems about mathematicians (Links to several of these are provided at the end of this post.) and one of the sources is Scottish poet Brian McCabe's  collection Zero (Polygon, 2009).    It is said that life imitates art -- and this is vividly demonstrated by the art of mathematics as lived by Abraham de Moivre (1667-1754).  Here is McCabe's poem. 

Queneau and the Oulipo

Raymond Queneau was one of the leaders of a group of ten--primarily writers and mathematicians, primarily French--who founded a group, "Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle" ("Workshop of Potential Literature"), that eventually became known as the Oulipo. Queneau described potential literature as "the search for new forms and structures that may be used by writers in any way they see fit."

More statistics -- from Hiawatha

As the author of this poem owes a debt to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, I too owe Greg Coxson -- who showed the poem to me.

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.

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

Digital poetry -- Stephanie Strickland et al

Stephanie Strickland writes with mastery of numbers, as we see in her poem below.  But numbers are only the beginning of her work.  A director of the Electronic Poetry Association and author of "Born Digital," Strickland is one of the leaders in the development of new types of poems that are constructed using animation and rearrangements and other visual and aural communications made possible by computers and the internet.

2013 (and prior) -- titles, dates of posts

Scroll down to find dates and titles (with links) of posts in 2013.  At the bottom are links to posts through 2012 and 2011 -- and all the way back to March 2010 when this blog was begun.   This link leads to a PDF file that lists searchable topics and names of poets and mathematicians presented herein.

Dec 30  Error Message Haiku
Dec 26  The angel of numbers . . .
Dec 23  Ah, you are a mathematician
Dec 20  Measuring Winter 

Love Physics

It turns out that one of the disadvantages of a long-term blog with lots of worthy material is that sometimes I lose track of fine work that I want to post.  And sometimes I find it again.  This morning I came across this poem by California conservationist Richard Retecki.

     Love Physics     by Richard Retecki

     equal forces
     oppositely directed
     canceled to zero

     then we tricked you
     exchanging pressure for light