Halloween -- Counting Pumpkins

     Recently I have found a website maintained by Jenna Laib, a K-8 math specialist in the Boston area -- and at her website there I have found a posting of a Halloween poem with accompanying prose that considers the value of using numbers to tell stories.  The poem is below -- and, along with it, the website offers many more.  

More about Raffi and Ken Whitely available at this  link.

Halloween Counting Rhymes

 Here are links to a pair of fun counting rhymes:

"Five Little Pumpkins"

"Three Little Witches"

Halloween Poems

            Double, double toil and trouble;
            Fire burn and caldron bubble.
            Cool it with a baboon's blood,
            Then the charm is firm and good.          from Shakespeare's Macbeth

Shakespeare's lines above are part of a collection of Halloween Poems offered at this link by the Poetry Foundation -- not a mathy group of poems but fun to read at this time of year.  Enjoy!

Browse Math-Poetry Links . . .

     Today I invite you to browse -- to spend a moment reading titles, clicking on a title that intrigues you.   ENJOY!

• TITLES OF POSTS (with links)
•      January, 2020
  •     We become what we think . . .
  •     With bits of mathematics, a poem for a New Year
•      December, 2019 
  •     Poetry made visual with math terms
  •     Math-poetry in support of immigrants
  •     Counted syllables --> holiday wishes . . .
  •     Where are you from?
  •     Writing to Learn -- try Haiku        

Celebrate Halloween with counting rhymes . . .

Halloween, Halloween, strangest sights I've ever seen . . .

Three Little Witches

One little, two little, three little witches
Fly over haystacks, fly over ditches,   

Five Little Pumpkins

 

Happy Halloween!

This children's rhyme is found at the DeepLearningToolKits(DLTK) website) and available at that site also with downloadable illustrations.  Enjoy!

Five Little Pumpkins

Five little pumpkins sitting on a gate.

Read it (math OR poem) more than once . ..

     Recently my poet-friend, Millicent Borges Accardi, sent me a copy of her latest book, Only More So (Salmon Poetry, 2016).  She mentioned a poem entitled "The Night of Broken Glass" for its mathematics -- indeed it includes several numbers as it movingly describes attempts at normalcy amid the horrors of urban attack; and it ends with this stanza :

      The essential business of living well
      Continues in shock waves
      That fall into the ground of innocent
      People, triggered inside a soul
      Of nothingness that pretended
      To solve an impossible equation.

     My favorite poem in Accardi's collection is "Amazing Grace" which I give you below.   It is a poem that, like an intriguing piece of mathematics, I have read, and read again, and again . ..  each time getting more meaning than the time before.
     For me, one of the similarities of poetry and math is their density, the need for several readings -- for reading both aloud and silently, for reading with pencil and paper for note-taking, for reading in the library and at the kitchen table, sitting or standing.

2014 (and prior) -- titles, dates of posts

Scroll down to find titles and dates of posts in 2014.  At the bottom are links to lists of posts through 2013 and 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  Be someone TO COUNT ON in 2015
Dec 28  A Fractal Poem
Dec 25  A thousand Christmas trees
Dec 24  The gift of a poem
Dec 20  The Girl Who Loved Triangles 

Tomorrow is Halloween

Typing Halloween in this blog's SEARCH Box will lead you to a 2010 posting of "Ghost Stories Written"  -- an algebra-related poem by Charles Simic;  this Poetry Foundation link will lead to a host of other seasonal poems.

Music on the hypotenuse

Dr. Cai Tianxin is a professor of mathematics (specializing in number theory) at Zhejiang University, China. He also is an accomplished and  well-known poet.

   The Number and the Rose     by Cai Tianxin 

From 2010 -- titles and dates of posts

List of postings  March 23 - December 31, 2010
A scroll 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 31  The year ends -- and we go on . . .
    Dec 30  Mathematicians are NOT entitled to arrogance
    Dec 28  Teaching Numbers
    Dec 26  Where are the Women?
    Dec 21  A Square for the Season
    Dec 20  "M" is for Mathematics and . . .  

Ghost stories in algebra -- Happy Halloween!

Born in Yugoslavia, Charles Simic emigrated at age 15 to Chicago; widely known and respected as a poet and teacher (at the University of New Hampshire), Simic served as US Poet Laureate during 2007-08.    This little poem is from The World Doesn't End (Mariner Books, 1989).

               Ghost Stories Written          by Charles Simic