Mathematician of the Day

     On this date, May 16, in the year 1718, the talented Maria Agnesi was born.  A great source of historical information about mathematics and mathematicians is MacTutor, a math-history website maintained by the School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews, Scotland.  One of the services that MacTutor provides is a list of names and information about mathematicians born on each day of the year.  For example, this link leads to the listing for May 16 -- and to lots of info about Agnesi.  Here, in a 7x7 syllable-square, is a brief sketch of  her life:

Maria Agnesi's life --

a complicated story --

wealthy and intelligent, 

in love with mathematics,

also very talented--

wrote a teaching text about 

differential calculus.

This 2018 Scientific American blog posting by Evelyn Lamb discusses a curve from calculus, often called (somewhat misleadingly) "the witch of Agnesi."   Previous mentions of Agnesi in this blog may be found at this link.

April Celebrates both Math and Poetry . . .

     April is Math-Stat Awareness Month and here at the American Mathematical Society website are lots of ideas for learning and enjoyment.  April also is National Poetry Month and, at this link, Poets.org suggests 30 fun ways to observe the occasion.

 Celebrate the ways
that focused language
leads us to new thoughts!

And . . . here are some poetry-with-math links to explore:    a Smithsonian Magazine article by Evelyn Lamb;  an article in Slate Magazine by Stephen Ornes;  a posting by Laura Laing on the Math for Grownups website;  from way back in 2009, an article by Shirley Dent in The Guardian. 

Enjoy all of these AND, when your time permits, browse or SEARCH this blog!

Keep Exploring . . .

     In addition to its published magazine, Scientific American has a large variety of blogs.  One of my favorites was Roots of Unity by mathematician Evelyn Lamb.  The blog -- with several hundred postings -- adds to the also-frequent articles that Lamb has contributed to that magazine,  In her posting, "What T. S. Eliot Told Me about the Chain Rule," she quotes these lines from "Little Gidding" by T. S. Eliot (published in Eliot's 1966 collection, Four Quartets) and discusses the outcomes of difficulty and confusion coupled with curiosity, energy, and persistence -- frequent ingredients of the process of learning new mathematics.

     from Little Gidding     by T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

       We shall not cease from exploration
       And the end of all our exploring
       Will be to arrive where we started
       And know the place for the first time.

Read more at Lamb's blog posting, "What T. S. Eliot Told Me about the Chain Rule."

Proofs in Poems -- the Sylow Theorems

     One of my valuable resources during this year 2020 has been the AMS PAGE A DAY CALENDAR by Evelyn Lamb -- published by the American Mathematical Society.
     Today, December 16, Lamb's calendar celebrates a collection of poems by British software engineer Patrick Stevens -- verses that together offer poetic proof of the Sylow theorems about the subgroups of a finite group.
     Here is a link to Stevens' collection of  "Slightly silly Sylow pseudo-sonnets" and these are the opening lines:

        Suppose we have a finite group called G.
        This group has size m times a power of p.
        We choose m to have coprimality:
        the power of p's the biggest we can see.
       . . .

This link leads to other mentions in this blog of Evelyn Lamb's math-poetry links.

Voting is on the calendar!

Poetry often surprises us by using familiar words in new ways -- and such is also the case with this cryptarithmetic puzzle -- offered by Evelyn Lamb in her AMS page-a-day calendar for tomorrow, Election Day.

               VOTES
           + VOTES
            CHANGE

In this puzzle (which Lamb credits to Manan Shah at mathmisery.com) each letter represents a base ten digit, no letter represents more than one digit at a time and no digit can be paired with more than one letter.  There are no leading zeroes; there are two solutions.  While you are waiting for results from the November 3 US election, this puzzle can help you pass the time in a way that's FUN!

Mathy Rhymes

     Yesterday's note on "A Mathematical Morsel Every Day" -- an American Mathematical Society page-a-day calendar for 2020 assembled by mathematician and writer Evelyn Lamb -- is a fact that involves the first six digits in the decimal expansion of  π :    314159 is a prime number.

And, because this is a math-poetry blog, I have turned this information into a syllable-square rhyme:

           3     1     4

           1     5     9

           is a prime!

Perhaps you'd like to explore more:    Here's a link to previous blog postings with ideas by Evelyn Lamb.    Rhymes often help us to remember; here is a link to postings of rhymes used to remember the digits of π.    AND here is a link to some postings that feature square stanzas.

A rhyme about a prime

     Tomorrow, May 16, is the birthday of Pafnuty Chebyshev (1821-1894), who was one of the founders of Russian mathematics and the first to prove (in 1850) a conjecture (about positive integers) made in 1845 by French mathematician Joseph Bertrand (1822-1900) and sometimes referred to as Bertrand's postulate.  This rhyming couplet celebrates that conjecture:

               Chebyshev said, and I'll say it again:
               There's always a prime between n and 2n.

Thanks to Evelyn Lamb's AMS Page-A-Day Calendar for its May 10 alert to the info above.

The Woman Who Bested the Men at Math

     An American Mathematical Society Page-a-Day Mathematics calendar, compiled by mathematician and free-lance writer Evelyn Lamb, has let me know today that tomorrow, April 4, marks the birthday of mathematician Philippa Garrett Fawcett (1868-1948), who became, "in 1890, the first woman to score the highest mark of all the candidates for the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge University." 
     Learn more about Philippa Fawcett at this website, "Biographies of Women Mathematicians,: --  maintained by Emeritus Professor Larry Riddle at Agnes Scott College.  Riddle's biographic sketch of Fawcett includes a poem of anonymous origin that celebrates her 1890 achievement.  Here are its opening stanzas:

If 1718 is a poem title . . .

If 1718 is a poem title, 

the poem should celebrate Marie Gaetana Agnesi (1718-1799)

author of the first book about both differential and integral calculus.

This post celebrates not only Agnesi (who was born 301 years ago today) but also present-day mathematician and writer Evelyn Lamb who produces lively and informative articles about STEM topics and people.  Go here to read Lamb's article about Agnesi for the Smithsonian Magazine on May 16, 2018 -- celebrating Agnesi's 300th birthday.

2017 is prime!

     For her December 31 posting in Roots of Unity (Scientific American blog) mathematician Evelyn Lamb wrote about favorite primes -- and starring in her list is our new year-number, 2017.
     My own relationship with primes also is admiring-- here is an excerpt from my poem, "Fool's Gold," (found in full here) that suggests a prime as a suitable birthday gift:

          Select and give a number.  I like large primes—
          they check my tendency to subdivide
          myself among the dreams that tease
          like iron pyrites in declining light.

     "Fool's Gold" appears in my chapbook, My Dance is Mathematics (Paper Kite Press, 2006); the collection is now out-of-print but is available online here. 
     Several poems about primes have been included in earlier postings in this blog.  For example, here is a link to a 2013 posting of "The Sieve of Erastosthenes" by Robin Chapman.  And, for further exploration, here is a link to the results of searching the six years of postings using the term "prime." 

Are we speaking of "mathematics" or "poetry"?

     This week started with the excitement of an email message from Evelyn Lamb with a link to her Scientific American blog where she created a fun-to-take online poetry-math quiz based on an idea of mine (first published in 1992):

Can you tell the difference between mathematics and poetry?

Here’s a link to a SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN quiz to help you decide?

And a couple of centuries ago there was William Wordsworth -- who also contemplated both poetry and mathematics:

               On poetry and geometric truth
               and their high privilege of lasting life,
               From all internal injury exempt,
               I mused; upon these chiefly:  and at length,
               My senses yielding to the sultry air,
               Sleep seized me, and I passed into a dream.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

The Prelude, Book 5

April Celebrates Poetry and Mathematics

On April 1 (the first day of National Poetry Month and Mathematics Awareness Month) Science writer Stephen Ornes offered a guest post at The Last Word on Nothing entitled "Can an Equation be a Poem?" and on April 2 the Ornes posting appeared again, this time in the blog Future Tense at Slate.com with the title "April Should Be Mathematical Poetry Month."
     In her comment on "Can an Equation be a Poem?" Scientific American blogger Evelyn Lamb (Roots of Unity)  mentioned her math-poetry post on March 21 entitled "What T S Eliot Told Me About the Chain Rule."  Lamb quotes lines from the final stanza "Little Gidding," the last of Eliot's Four Quartets.   Here is the entire stanza with its emphasis on the mysteries of time and perspective, the circular nature of things, the difficulty of discovering a beginning.    

Logic in limericks

In these lines, Sandra DeLozier Coleman (who participated in the math-poetry reading at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Baltimore in January) speaks as a professor reasoning in rhyme, explaining truth-value technicalities of the logical implication, "If p then q" (or, in notation, p -- > q ).

     The Implications of Logic     by Sandra DeLozier Coleman

     That p --> q is true,
     Doesn’t say very much about q.
     For if p should be false,
     Then there’s really no loss
     In assuming that q could be, too.  

Poetry at JMM -- groups, etc.

     A math-poetry reading on January 11 at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Diego -- organized by Gizem Karaali (an editor of the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics) and Sue VanHattum (blogger at Math Mama Writes) -- has been featured in Evelyn Lamb's Scientific American blog.  

Next year's JMM will be in Baltimore, MD during January 15-18, 2014.  

There will be a poetry reading -- details will be posted here when they're available.

     Sandra DeLozier Coleman is a retired mathematics professor who has for many years written poems that relate to math.  Her poem (presented below) about the definition of a mathematical group was featured in the Scientific American blog.  When DeLozier read the poem in San Diego, her introduction to it included these words: "I’m poking a bit of fun at the futility of expecting a mathematician to explain a math concept, as familiar to him as his name, in language even a first week student will understand. Here the voice is of an Abstract Algebra professor who is attempting to explain what makes a set a group in rigorous rhyme!" 

One type of "mathematical" poetry

When I began (in the 1980s) collecting examples of "mathematical poetry," I sought lines of verse that included some mathematical terminology.  More recently, my view has expanded to include structual, visual, and algorithmic influcences from mathematics; however, the two samples from the work of William Blake (1757-1827), presented below, fit into that initial category -- selected as "mathematical" because of their vocabulary -- one speaks of "infinity," the other of "symmetry."  (Blake was an artist as well as poet and his volumes of poetry were illustrated with his prints.)  The following stanza is the opening quatrain for Blake's poem "Auguries of Innocence."