Each year MoMath (The National Museum of Mathematics) sponsors The Steven H. Strogatz Prize for Math Communication -- a contest for high school students; guidelines for next year's contest (deadline: April 28, 2023) are available here.
The 2022 Strogatz Prize winners include a poem -- "a proof of the function me" -- by Wyeth Renwick; here are its opening lines.
a proof of the function me by Wyeth Renwick
step one.
find u.
step two.
add u to me and watch how the whole graph shifts upwards
to make a u sized space where before it was only me
until we're floating above the x-axis, u + me, an infinite
line that stretches on past billions of little boxes
on this graph paper grid. let yourself think
that maybe, just maybe, we were made for this - let yourself
solve for the limits of the function and find that
u + me approaches infinity.
step three.
square it all, square everything - make us into the parabola
that my smile can't help but curve into when you pull
our pinkies together and hold on real tight . . .
Renwick's complete poem is available here (click on poem-title).
The MoMath website offers these thoughtful comments about the poem:
Wyeth Renwick’s poem is intriguingly ambiguous and open to interpretation: some of the judges read it as a love poem that winks at the reader with its use of mathematical concepts and language, while others saw it as a poetic animation of a human relationship, viewed as the graph of a function. Either way, it makes math and poetry both seem more accessible to students who might otherwise not be drawn to these subjects.
Here is a link to previous postings in this blog that mention MoMath.
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