Math Women -- and one of them writes Poetry

     One of my recent delights was to be contacted by mathematician Lakshmi Chandrasekaran, a mathematician that is one of the team at Her Maths Story -- a website (found at https://hermathsstory.eu/ ) that publicizes and celebrates the stories of female mathematicians.  A bit of background about the website is shown in the screen-shot below:

Women's History Month -- Celebrate MATH-WOMEN

      A book that I return to again and again for mathy poems is Manifold:  Poetry of Mathematics by E. R. Lutken (Taos Press, 2021).  Lutken therein celebrates a mathematician that I greatly admire, Amalie Emmy Noether (1882-1935).  

     Here are several powerful lines from Lutken's poem "Emmy Noether and the Conservation of Hope":

. . . .                    Her awe of abstract algebra endured.

     Against winds feeling hatred,
     purge of Jews from academics.
     she wrote, thought, taught from home.
     Flames reaching the streets
     forced a journey of tears,
     exile to America/

                         She searched the heart of mathematics
                                    and physics from wherever.

Lutken's complete poem is available at this link;  for and previous postings in this blog of work by E. R. (Emily) Lutken, follow this link.  A varied collection of postings featuring Emmy Noether may be found at this link.

AND, to further celebrate women in math and poetry, explore the labels in the right-hand column of this blog AND use the SEARCH box.

Black History Month Celebrates Math Women

     Black mathematicians and female mathematicians often have not been given the credit they deserve -- and I have been delighted to find this website that features eleven famous African-American mathematicians --  six of which are women.   This website celebrates: 

2.) Fern Hunt (1948-   )     Fern Hunt is best known for her work in applied mathematics and mathematical biology. Throughout her great career, she has been involved with biomathematics, patterns in genetic variation, and chaos theory.   She currently works as an educator and presenter with the aim of encouraging women and minority students to pursue graduate degrees in mathematics and other STEM fields. 

5.) Katherine Johnson (1918-2020)  Katherine Johnson was the main character of the critically acclaimed film "Hidden Figures." Her contributions in the field of orbital mechanics, alongside fellow female African American mathematicians Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, were critical to the United States’ success in putting astronaut John Glenn into orbit in 1962.  She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in 2015.

Poet and Math Teacher Passes On

     Poet Jonathan Holden (1941-2024) -- who, early in his career, was a math teacher -- died just a few weeks ago.  Seeing his death notice has reminded me to revisit and again enjoy and appreciate his work.  My first mention of Holden's work in this blog was in this posting in January, 2011 -- and here is a link to the list of postings in which his poetry is featured.  

     Two of Holden's mathy poems are included in the anthology that was gathered by mathematician-poet Sarah Glaz and me -- Strange Attractors,  Poems of Love and Mathematics (A K Peters/ CRC Press, 2008).  One of these is "The Departure of an Alphabet,"  a poem that deals with age-related decline of memory and reasoning.  I offer its opening lines:

from   The Departure of an Alphabet     by Jonathan Holden  

Mathy Poets -- Gone but Alive in our Memories

     In a recent NYTimes article I have learned of the passing of poet-mathematician Jacques Robaud (1932-2024) who was a key figure in the development of OULIPO (an organization that has explored writing using a variety of constraints).  Here is a link to Robaud's poem "Amsterdam Street."

     Today's Washington Post offers the obituary poet and scientist Myra Sklarew (1934-2024).  Sklarew  was a DC resident and activist -- and is featured in these past postings in this blog.

Celebrate AMS Award Winner Katherine Stange

      For me, postings on X (Twitter) are a frequent source of math-poetry news.  Today I found this:

This link leads to information about Stange's award.

Mathematician Katherine Stange is the daughter of a poet (Ken Stange) and their math-poetry connection is perhaps what led Kate to collect an anthology of mathy poems, available online at this link.   Here are the opening stanzas of one of the poems in Stange's anthology.  

PRECISION vs. IMAGINATION

     In the creation and development of both mathematics and poetry both PRECISION and IMAGINATION are important.  Recently I came across the announcement of a book entitled Poetic Logic and the Origins of the Mathematical Imagination -- written by Canadian professor if semiotics, Marcel Danesi, and part of the Springer-Nature series, Mathematics in Mind,  Here is a link to an overview of Danesi's book.  And, in the publisher's summary of the Danesi book, we find this:

The aim of this volume is to look broadly at what constitutes the mathematical mind through the Vichian lens of poetic logic. 

Reading Danesi's ideas and thinking about my own poetic musings has reminded me of a long-ago poem of mine, "Can A Mathematician See Red?"  I posted this poem in this blog long ago (in August 2011, at this link) -- and I offer it again, below.    

A Mathematician's Villanelle

     One of the most active and effective ambassadors for connections between mathematics and the arts is Gizem Karaali. Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at California's Pomona College.  Poet and writer as well as teacher and researcher, Karaali is a founding editor of Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, a peer-reviewed open-access journal that publishes articles, essays, fiction and poetry with a rich variety of connections to mathematics.

     Recently I rediscovered online one of Karaali's poems, a villanelle published almost ten years ago in the Mathematical Association of America's undergraduate magazine, Math Horizons (February, 2015, Volume 22, Issue 3).

A MATHEMATICIAN'S VILLANELLE       by Gizem Karaali

When first did I learn to cherish the bittersweet taste of mathematics?
Mental torture, subtle joy, doubt and wonder, me in meaning
Must have come later, after the games, the limericks, the lyrics.

Strange ceremonies awaited me, mystical hymns, magic tricks,
After the first gulp of water, the first bite, the first bloodletting.
When first did I learn to cherish the bittersweet taste of mathematics?

A Poem Structured by a Finite Field

       Mathematician Ursula Whitcher is an Associate Editor for the American Mathematical Society's Mathematical Reviews and a poet -- someone whom I first met at a conference, "Creative Writing in Mathematics," at the Banff International Research Station in 2016.  conferences.  She is a versatile writer  -- with a long list of publications available here at her website.

     Here is Whitcher's mathematically-structured poem, "Tuesday," first published in 2019 in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, at this link.

     Tuesday     by Ursula Whitcher

          Sometimes it is not possible to mend
          what’s broken, either if you meant
          to prove something impossible, or else
          to save someone. Your best friend has
          not eaten for six days.  Your father loses things. 
          Your brother lies.
          It’s Tuesday, so the week’s no longer new, and yet
          nowhere near done.
          All you can do is move
          and keep on moving, trust
          time changes shattered things
          and lies once known are maps.

Author’s Note. This poem’s form is taken from the structure of the field with seven elements: the meter, in iambs, follows a pattern based on 5, 4, 6, 2, 3, the nontrivial values taken by powers of 5 (mod 7) as it generates the group of units of the field.

Previous mentions of Ursula Whitcher in this blog are listed at this link.

World's Most Interesting Mathematician

     Angela Tabiri, a young mathematician from Ghana, in July captured global attention by winning the title,  World’s Most Interesting Mathematician. Here is her story!  This accolade was bestowed upon her by The Big Internet Math-Off, a competition held in the US last July.  Here is a link to the finals in the competition in which Angela's winning entry is included.

Go here for Angela Tabiri's math story.

Bridges 2024 -- in Richmond, VA

      As she had done in numerous preceding years, mathematician-poet Sarah Glaz is once again an organizer for a poetry reading at the BRIDGES Math-Arts Conference -- this year to be held in Richmond, Virginia, August 1-5.

Bridges Poetry Reading Website

  Poetry Reading Sunday, August 4, 3:00 - 5:00 pm     

Science Museum of Virginia , Room: RF& P Forum

2500 West Broad Street    Richmond, Virginia

Celebrate Blaise Pascal

      A couple of weeks ago (on June 19) I learned on X (formerly Twitter) that 401 years ago, mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was born -- more info here.  Probably Pascal is best known for the array of numbers called Pascal's triangle -- and that array has influenced poetry as well as mathematics.

    My source of this info about Pascal was an ongoing collection of postings on X by Mathematics & Statistics St Andrews,  @StA_Maths_Stats, which offers lots of historical facts about math and math people.  Their June 19 posting offered this:

Mathematicians that aren't white men . . .

          Who
          can do
          mathematics?
          What about girls and women
          and people of color?
          We need to open
          our eyes and
          our doors! 

      Even though mathematicians are frequently exploring new ideas and patterns of thought, minds often have been closed against recognizing math skills in varied groups of people.  It has taken lots of effort to get math doors opened to women, to people of color.  Here are some informative and inspiring videos:

Journeys of Black Mathematicians (A documentary project by George Csicsery)

Meet a Mathematician:  Dr. Gizem Karaali

Meet a Mathematician:  Dr. Lisa Fauci 

Remembering Bob Grumman . . .

      Recently I discovered an online article -- "Bob Grumman’s mathematical universe: somewhere, minutely, a widening" by mathematician-poet Sarah Glaz) at Synapse International, an international visual poetry gathering, co-edited by Philip Davenport and karl kempton) that celebrates the work of math visual-poet Bob Grumman (1941-2015)..  When I visited the article by Glaz, I also found several other articles that celebrated Grumman -- found here at this link for Issue 7, January 2024.

     Below I post two of  Grumman's Mathemaku -- visual poems that involve mathematical symbols and the brevity of Haiku; one of them is found in the article by Glaz mentioned above and the second is found here (along with others) in an article by karl kempton.

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.

Finite vs. Infinite

     One of my frequent interesting reads is the Quote of the Day #QOTD posted on Twitter by Mathematics & Statistics at St Andrews, @StA_Maths-Stats.  A few days ago I found there the following mathy-poetic and thought-provoking quote by Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam (1909-1984):

     The infinite 
          we shall do right away. 
     The finite
               may take a little longer.

  [Quoted in D MacHale, "Comic Sections" (first published in Dublin 1993)]

Mathematician, Poet -- Blind to the worth of Women

     As we study mathematics and learn of outstanding mathematicians, many of us do not also learn which of those mathematicians also were poets.  A posting that I found recently in Marian Christie's blog, Poetry and Mathematics, features poetry by  Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831-39).

     Maxwell's verse also is featured in the math-poetry anthology, Strange Attractors:  Poems of Love and Mathematics (A.K Peters, Ltd., 2008);  preview available here at amazon.com.

     Below I offer a stanza from a Maxwell poem (posted in this blog back in December, 2015) -- a stanza that shows the long-mistaken attitude that has existed about inferior abilities of math-women: 

Stories of Women and Girls in Science

The website for Agnes Scott College has a wonderful collection of biographies of math women  -- and today I focus particularly on the story of mathematician Marie-Sophie Germain (1776-1831).   I quote below a few words about Germain:

Sophie began teaching herself mathematics using the books in her father's library. Her parents felt that her interest was inappropriate for a female (the common belief of the middle-class in the 19th century) and did all that they could to discourage her.  

Related to the idea expressed in this quote is a thoughtful poem about Germain by Colorado poet Jessy Randall;  the poem is part of Randall's very special collection Mathematics for Ladies, Goldsmiths Press, 2022 and I offer it below:

Write about a MATH-WOMAN -- and WIN!

     Years ago -- when I was the only woman in the Bloomsburg University mathematics department --  I wrote a poem, "My Dance is Mathematics," about the mathematician Emmy Noether -- and it contained the following lines:

               If a woman's dance is mathematics,
               She dances alone.

But things are changing!  Founded in 1971, AWM (Association for Women in Mathematics) has been actively celebrating the lives of female mathematicians  -- and one of AWM's current and far-reaching activities is a STUDENT ESSAY CONTEST for which students -- in middle-school, high-school, and college categories -- are invited to interview a female mathematician and write about her.  The essay-submission period is December 1, 2023 - February 1, 2024.  Questions may be directed to AWM Essay Contest Organizer, Dr. Johanna Franklin (johanna.n.franklin@hofstra.edu). 

The Thirst to Know HOW MANY?

    One of the important math-poetry projects that I have been involved in is Strange Attractors:  Poems of Love and Mathematics, a poetry anthology collected and edited by mathematician-poet Sarah Glaz and me -- published by AK Peters/CRC Press in 2008 and now available on Kindle and at various online used-book sites.

     A poem in Strange Attractors that I have been drawn to again recently is "Ode to Numbers" by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904-1973).  Here are its opening lines: 

from  Ode to Numbers     by Pablo Neruda

          Oh, the thirst to know
          how many!
          The hunger
          to know
          how many
          stars in the sky!