Integrating . . .

      Integrating our fields of knowledge makes them more useful -- a view that has been correct for me, at least, and I am delighted when I find more people integrating poetry with mathematics.  This link leads to materials offered by the American Mathematical Society that connect with poetry.

     Several years ago an article of mine --  entitled "Everything Connects" -- was published in the Journal of Mathematics and the Arts.  Below I offer a brief poem from the article (a Fib, with syllable counts equal to the first six Fibonacci numbers).  Here is a link to a 2020 blog posting about the article and here is a link to the article.  The following Fib is included in the article:

Speaking in Fibs . . .

     Syllable-count patterns often are used in poems--helping to give a rhythmic tempo to the words.  As I mention often, syllable counts -- and other word-patterns -- help me to discover new and special meanings to convey. When I start to write, my thoughts are scattered and need to be gathered and focused -- and a poetic form helps this to happen.  The sonnet and the villanelle have long been valued examples of poetry patterns.  More recent -- and more simple -- is the Fib.  Introduced by poet Gregory Pincus back in 2006, the Fib is a six-line poem whose syllables are counted by the first six Fibonacci numbers:  1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8. (Each succeeding Fibonacci number is the sum of the two that precede it.)

     Since 2006, a journal aptly named The Fib Review has offered (available at this website) more than 40 issues of poems, all of whose lines have syllable-counts that are  Fibonacci numbers.  Here is a portion of one of the poems -- by Washington-based poet Sterling Warner --  (the complete poem is found here).

Here is a link to another blog posting that features poetry from The Fib Review.

And lots more FIBS may be found here.

EARTH DAY -- what are ways to preserve our planet?

Save
our
Mother
Earth -- conserve 
our resources, shift 
to non-polluting substances.

As many of you readers know, the poem above is an example of  a FIB -- a six-line poem with syllable-counts matching the first six Fibonacci numbers,  When I sit down to write about a particular topic, I often find the the FIB format is a good way to start -- developing an idea starting with single words and gradually developing longer phrases.   And, today, outside of this blog, I am trying to learn more about earth friendly substances.

If you have time to be interested in more mathy and earth-friendly poems, this link leads to the results of a blog search for climate change and this second link leads to previous Earth Day blog postings.

 This link leads to postings -- and poems -- in this blog related to CLIMATE.

And here is a link to several previous EARTH DAY postings..

Discovery Tool -- Following a Pattern

     When I pick up a pen to write on a particular subject, often it is useful me to try to follow a pattern for rhymes or syllable-counts -- for the effort to conform to a pattern challenges me to think about my topic in new ways.  In the history of poetry, rhyme-choices were frequent--yielding sonnets, villanelles and a variety of other forms.  

     In recent years, online and printed versions of poems have become very accessible and the principle, "Rhymes help us remember" has become less of a focus in poetry.  One of the popular connections between math and poetry has been the use of Fibonacci numbers to choose syllable counts;  especially  popular has been the FIB, a six-line stanza in which the syllable-counts are 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, and 8 -- the first six Fibonacci numbers.  (Inventor of the FIB was Greg Pincus, and lots of information is provided here in this 2010 blog posting, Poems with Fibonacci number patterns.)  

Poetry at the Joint Mathematics Meetings

        During January 4-7, 2024, mathematics meetings were held in San Francisco, CA.  Although unable to attend, I have spent some time browsing abstracts of the presentations there and found several that involve poetry.  Suzanne Sumner of the University of Mary Washington, gave a presentation entitled "How Poetry Informs the History of Mathematics" and here is a link to the abstract for Sumner's presenation.

     From Sumner's abstract I learn that the ancient Sanskrit scholar Acharya Pingala was likely to have been the first to use Fibonacci numbers and Pascal's triangle in his poetry. Using this blog's SEARCH feature, I found this link to prior mentions of Fibonacci in this blog and this link to mentions of Pascal.

Should I take notes?

One of the things about my learning process that I was not fully aware of during many of my school years was the role that my fingers play in my thinking and learning.  Taking notes -- as I read or as I listen to a teacher's presentation -- helps the ideas to become part of me, even if i do not reread and study the notes afterward.

A Fib about how I think and learn

When I began writing poetry I started to notice that my fingers also became part of the creative writing process . ..  sometimes my fingers wrote words before my mind knew them.  And I loved these discoveries!

Is this writing-thinking link also part of you?

Shaping a Poem with Fibonacci numbers

      One of my favorite websites to visit is this varied and thoughtful "Poetry and Mathematics"  collection of postings by Marian Christie.

     Throughout history, people who write poems have often been aided by constraints.  When we sit down to write, writing the words that first occur to us -- then shaping the word into extended meanings but following a pattern of rhythm or rhyme or word-count . . . or . . .  .  For many poets the sonnet, for example, has been a poetic structure that shapes thoughts into special arrangements of words.

     In long-ago days, when print and screen versions of poems were not easily available, rhyme schemes were an important aid -- helping one's memory to keep a poem in one's head.  Now, aided by widely available print and online visibility, poetry has moved into new forms -- including a variety of visual arrangements.  

Exploring the truth with a FIB

     Recently I have been reconnected with British-Israeli mathematician-educator, Yossi Elran  (whom I met at a conference in Banff several years ago).  Elran is well known for his puzzle-book, Lewis Carroll's Cats And Rats... And Other Puzzles With Interesting Tails (World Scientific, 2021).  He is in the process of writing a sequel to this book and it will include some math-poetry; probably some Fibs (poems  -- often with just 6 lines -- with syllable-counts per line that follow the Fibonacci numbers).   Elran's recent email query about Fibs helped me to remember that I had one waiting to be posted, a Fib about missed opportunities and status for women.  Here is is:

Exploring the truth with a FIB        by JoAnne Growney

Writing -- a Path toward Knowing

     Advice for my grandchildren -- in the form of a Fib.  (Wish I had remembered to give it on November 23 -- which is Fibonacci day. ) 

 

    1            When

    1            I

    2            want to

    3            understand

    5            something difficult

    8            I grab my pen, write about it.

     I'm not sure when I made the discovery but by the time I was in graduate school  I knew that my learning pattern involved my fingers and my pen.  I copied definitions into a notebook, sometimes trying to rephrase them in my own words.  I elaborated the proofs of theorems . . . my fingers helped me remember.

November 23 is celebrated as Fibonacci day because when the date is written in the mm/dd format (11/23), the digits in the date form a Fibonacci sequence: 1,1,2,3. A Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers where a number is the sum of the two numbers before it.  A Fib is a tiny poem whose lines have as syllable-counts the first 6 Fibonacci numbers.  

For more Fibonacci-related poems, follow this link. 

Worried about Climate Change

     When working with students in poetry workshops I often ask them to write to satisfy a constraint -- perhaps a Fib or a square poem -- in order to help them focus their thoughts.  This morning -- in the middle of a heat wave -- I focused my thoughts squarely on my growing concerns about climate.

       Steamy weather.  I count
       the degrees.  I count on
       air conditioning.  But
       my cooling system adds
       to global warming.  What
       is the right thing to do?

 Here is a link to previous postings in this blog that offer climate concerns.

The Mobius Strip -- in a LIMERICK

     Mathematics offers brief, condensed language for many big ideas.  Even for small problems -- such as the word problems of a beginning algebra class -- translation of the words into a mathematical equation offers the chance to express the problem precisely and to solve it using established procedures.    

     And brief mathematical forms also are popular in poetry -- the six-line Fib and the five-line rhyming stanza called a limerick both have wide appeal.  And, because of the brevity, the language must be concise.  At this webpage, maintained by Joachim Verhagen, are lots and lots of mathy limericks.  Here is a sample:

          The Moebius strip is a pain,
          When you cut it again and again,
               But if you should wedge
              A large disk round the edge
          Then you just get a PROjective plane.

This link leads to an interesting article about a Mobius strip made of light (see also the photo below); this link leads to a Wikipedia article about a real projective plane.  And more of Verhagen's Mobius strip limericks may be found here.  

A Mobius strip from this NOVA article

This link leads to a website with instruction for construction and playful activities with a Mobius strip.  To enjoy limericks found in earlier postings in this blog, follow this link.

Build a Poem using a Fano Plane

     Many of the mathematical poetic forms introduced in this blog are structures that can be used to build a poet's fragmented thoughts into complete and poetic form.  The Fib, for example, gives a syllable structure to help a writer shape an idea. Syllable-squares are another simple structure and -- familiar also but much more complex -- the fourteen-line Sonnet in iambic pentameter.

     Math Professor Dan May of South Dakota often works with an interesting and more complex structure called the Fano Plane -- a finite projective plane of order 2 -- and composed of 7 vertices with 7 connecting lines, each joining three vertices: 

Poetry at the Mathematics Conference

      Last weekend, April 6-9, was a virtual national jmm - Joint Mathematics Meetings -- and I attended a number of sessions that explored links between the focused languages of mathematics and poetry.  Presenters that I was privileged to hear included Carol Dorf, Sarah Glaz, Gizem Karaali, and Dan May.  Math guy Douglas Norton of Villanova University organized contributed-paper session on "Mathematics and the Arts" and also hosted a Friday-evening poetry reading -- an event in which much of the action was writing and sharing Fibs (6-line poems with syllable count being the first six Fibonacci numbers).  Here are several samples:

From Doug Norton:                                     From Dan May:

Me?                                                                        Pet
Write?                                                                    me
A Fib?                                                                     Or I
Not a fib.                                                                will bite you.
Put my heart in it.                                                  Nighttime is here, time
Let’s just see what comes bleeding out.                  to burn off all that hay I ate.

From David Reimann:                            From Gizem Karaali: 

Joint                                                                   one
Math                                                                    golde
Meetings                                                              dragon
Zoom with friends                                                metallic,
poetry alive                                                          majestic creature --
breathing words across many miles . . .               not sure I want to meet one now

 

Reduce stress in math class -- write a poem

       Recently I have come across a website for the New England Literary Resources Center -- and one of the suggestions offered for managing stress in a math class is by writing poems; here is a link to a sample of stressed students' poems. 

     My favorite suggestion for inexperienced poets who take pen in hand is to choose a syllable-count structure to follow -- such as a syllable-square or a snowball or a Fib . . .. AND, from the website Pen and the Pad, here are some additional ideas to consider:   How to Write a Mathematical Poem (penandthepad.com)

And, as I worried, I wrote this Fib:

          Stop . . .
          Think . . .        
          Wonder
          What to say!
          I gather my thoughts
          and hope I can make a poem!

Seven-line Fibs

 In a previous post (on 2/2/2222), I shared a link to dozens of Fibs;
today I offer a Fib variation -- this time with 7 lines.

     Daughter of a statistics professor, poet A. E. Stallings is no stranger to mathematics.  Here is a link to several dozen of her poems posted by the Poetry Foundation -- and this link leads to a posting of her poem "Sine Qua Non" in this blog.  Recently I discovered Stallings 2012 collection Olives (a sample is available here) and in it, "Four Fibs."   Deviating from the six-line poem that is often called a Fib, Stallings' poems have seven lines -- with syllable-counts of 1,1,2,3,5,8, and 13 syllables: here is a sample.

from   Four Fibs     by A. E. Stallings 

          1.       Did
                   Eve
                   believe
                   or grapple
                   over the apple?
                   Eavesdropping Adam heard her say
                  To the snake-oil salesman she was not born yesterday. 

Here in the archives of the Cortland Review (where "Four Fibs" first appeared) is more of Stallings' work, including the other three Fibs.

+ plus magazine . . . living mathematics

     One of the very fine sources of interesting and new ideas from mathematics is +plus magazine -- available since 1997 from the University of Cambridge --  at this link.  Way back in 2010 they featured a Fib from this blog (at this link) and they have been generous in their mentions of Strange Attractors:  Poems of Love and Mathematics (A K Peters/CRC Press, 2008), edited by Sarah Glaz and me.  They also have introduced (at this link) a wonderful collection of scientific Haiku (SCIKU  Icon Books, 2014) -- edited by Simon Flynn, written by students at the Camden School for Girls.  Here are two samples from that collection:

          Gravity

               An attractive force
               Between all objects with mass
               Just like you and me.

          Dissolving confusion

               To some, solutions
               Are answers; to chemists they
               Are still all mixed up.

Enjoy exploring this innovative online mathy magazine.

Amid uncertainties -- compose a Fib

How many Corona-virus cases will the new year bring?

Stop,
Think!       
Wonder
What to say . . .
I gather my thoughts
and hope I can make a poem.

A(nother) blog that celebrates Math-and-Poetry

      Recently I have come to know another strong advocate of math-poetry connections.  Marian Christie (read about her here) has had longtime interest in both mathematics and poetry and her blog -- available at  https://marianchristiepoetry.net/ -- explores topics that include "Poetry and Fractals," "Poetry and Number Sequences,"  "Poetry and Permutations," . . . reflection symmetry and square poems and Fibonacci poems . . .. and lots more.  Allow yourself time to explore when you visit https://marianchristiepoetry.net/. 

     When I am working with a group of students are nervous about their ability to write a poem, I often start by asking them to write a Fib, because it starts with single syllables,  In her posting about Fibonacci poems, Christie offers this simple     example of how the Fib structure can lead you to a poem. 
               I
               like
               playing
               with patterns
               in crochet, music,
               poetry and mathematics.

If you are new to Fibs, try this CHALLENGE: using the same first two lines as Christie used above, create a Fibonacci poem.  And then another ... and another.

Shaping Poems with Numbers

      Numerical patterns can help guide our minds and fingers to create poems -- and one of the patterns I like is the Fibonacci numbers -- a number sequence for which the first non-zero numbers are both 1, and each succeeding number is the sum of the two preceding numbers.

          1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, . . .

Formation of a six-line poem using the first 6 of these numbers as syllable-counts, gives a tiny poem that has been named a Fib.

For me, using these Fibonacci numbers  -- starting small and growing -- as syllable counts offers a nice structure for developing my thoughts around a particular topic.  I like it for myself (a couple examples below) and I suggest to my students when I am asking them to share their math-related viewpoints. 

   When                                                   When
   your                                                      your
   father                                                   mother
   is mathy                                               is mathy
   what are the chances                          what are the chances
   that interest is passed to you?           that interest is passed to you?

 These days I celebrate the fact that I have granddaughters who like math!

What will the groundhog predict?

     Having grown up in western Pennsylvania, not far from Punxsutawney, I have long been interested in Groundhog Day -- on February 2, a legendary groundhog emerges from its burrow and predicts whether the current year will have an early spring.  This year I celebrate with a Fib, a stanza whose syllable counts follow the Fibonacci numbers:

       Will
       the 
       groundhog --
       tomorrow --
       see its shadow, doom
       us to six more weeks of winter?

Here is a link to a SEARCH list of previous blog postings for Groundhog Day.