Number Personalities . . .

      Sometimes our experiences with objects or ideas leads us to assign them personalities -- a notion illustrated in the poem "Zero," by Sue Owen, a poem that lives on my shelf in the anthology Verse and Universe:  Poems about Science and Mathematics, edited by Kurt Brown (Milkweed Editions, 1998), and offered below.

Zero     by Sue Owen

       This is the story of zero,
       born to live a life
       of emptiness, only
       child of plus and minus.

       Its bones invisible
       so it could be seen through
       like an eye.
       With that vision, you could      

TalkingWriting with Mathematics

     TalkingWriting is an online journal that's celebrating its 10th birthday -- TEN YEARS of including mathematics in its mix of poetry.  This mathy connection has grown strong through the poetry editorship of Carol Dorf, poet and retired math teacher.  In this anniversary issue, poems are paired with works of visual art and the effect is stunning; from it,  I offer below samples of poems by Amy Uyematsu and by me.      
      Amy Uyematsu's poem "Lunes During This Pandemic"  thoughtfully applies the counting structure of the "lune" (aka "American Haiku") with three-line stanzas of 3/5/3 words per line.

Opening our minds to New Views . . .

     One of the values of study of mathematics is that to make progress we must continually revise our ways of looking at things. (Yes, there can be numbers less than zero . . . Yes, there can be different sizes for infinite sets . . . )  And a challenge for our society today is to carefully reconsider our racism.   Recently the American Mathematical Society's Blog On Math Blogs has offered this thoughtful posting, "What does anti-racism in mathematics look like?"  
     From visual poet Karl Kempton (who celebrates a birthday today) I offer a visual-poetry reminder of multiple ways of viewing a situation -- illustrated by two views of dividing the number 8.

For more ways of looking at 8 and other mathematical poems by Kempton, go here.

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        

We become what we think . . .

     Browsing a recent issue of World Literature Today, I have found a thought-provoking activist poem by Linda Hogan that considers the ways we are shaped by "our numbers."  I offer below its opening stanzas:

       Embodied   by Linda Hogan

       I am embodied first by the numbers
       given my grandparents,
       no choice but to sign the Dawes Act.    

With bits of mathematics, a poem for a New Year

     Here -- containing bits of mathematical terminology --  is an excerpt from "A Poem for the New Year" by Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo (1932-1967).  

from    A Poem for the New Year     by Christopher Okigbo

          Where then are the roots, where the solution
          To life’s equation?

          The roots are nowhere
          There are no roots here
          Probe if you may
          From now until doomsday
          We have to think of ourselves as forever   

Poetry and Science

     Originally from Scotland, Alice Major is a celebrated Canadian poet whose work often focuses on key ideas in mathematics and science. (Visit her website for lots of links.)  The following lines of Major's verse appear in the Canadian magazine Prairie Fire (offering Major's presentation in the Anne Szumigalski lecture series entitled "Scansion and Science"); they are taken from Major's latest collection, Welcome to the Anthropocene."  Enjoy this sample, then follow the links and read much more:

 . . . poetry by Alice Major . . .

Also from Welcome to the Anthropocene, Major's poem  "Zero divided by zero" is available at this link here in my blog "Intersections -- Poetry with Mathematics" -- and a blog-search leads to lots more of her work.

An Ode to Mathematics

     One of the math-poets that I have met through this blog is Foteck Ivota, a mathematics teacher in the Cameroon.  In an email message, Ivota has offered this point of view:
       I love poetry too so much and I believe poetry  can be used as a means of making students love and develop interest in mathematics. As teachers of this beautiful subject we face a lot of challenges to make students perceive maths as easy and down to earth.   
     Ivota also has shared several poems with me; here is one of them:

      An Ode to Mathematics     by Foteck Ivota

       Your merits, maths, many may miss
       And in ignorance may dismiss
       Marvelous Maths that is life,
       Believing that all is strife.

            Chorus:
                 Maths for you and Maths for me,
                 Maths, Maths and Maths for all,
                 Maths, Maths for everything.    

Love, marriage, and number . . .

     Australian poet Richard Scutter has online collection of his own poems (this link leads to a chronological listing) and of favorite poems (go to this link and scroll down) by himself and others.  Here are samples:

        Marriage Mathematics

        each one bending
        to a heavenly plus
        couple greater value
                   1 + 1 = 3 + ...      

         ... and serious if a series starts
        but the minus of hell
        when one leaves  
                   2 – 1 = 0                          

   The poem was found (dated 18 June 2007) at this site.

I'm tired of being a zero vector . ..

there are more       to figures       than ever meets       the eye

     Inexhaustible GOOGLE has led me to a website "The Best Philippine Short Stories" which contains not only stories but also artwork and poems.  Eileen Tupaz, now a central character in Quezon City's White Space Wellness Studio, has given me permission to include samples of her math poems first published by BPSS -- poems written in 2000 when she was a student at Ateneo de Manila University.

Poems by Eileen Tupaz

     soulmates
  
     we are all of us
     nonsingular creatures
     whose identities
     must be affirmed
     before our inverses
     can be found   

Zero plus anything is . . .

     Poet Jane Hirshfield is an award-winning poet, essayist and translator whose work and I admire and enjoy.  In her collections I have found a thoughtful share of poems with links to mathematics -- and links to my previous postings of her work may be found here.  The MATH theme collection at poets.org has led me to another of her poems and I offer its opening stanzas here:

     Zero Plus Anything Is a World      by Jane Hirshfield

     Four less one is three.

     Three less two is one.

     One less three
     is what, is who,
     remains.     

Looking back . . . titles, links to previous posts

      For your browsing pleasure,here are titles and links to previous blog postings.  Below are listed linked-titles of posts from 2018 and up-to now in 2019 and here is a link to a list of titles and links for posts prior to 2018.  

•       March 13   An Interview of/by a Mathy Poet
•       March 11   Celebrate Pi-Day on 3.14
•       March  6    Celebrate Math-Women with Poems!
•       March  4    Math in 17 Syllables

February 2019: 

• Solving for X, Searching for LIFE
• Stories of Black Mathematicians (event postponed)
• All Numbers are Interesting . . .
• George Washington, cherry tree, lifespan . . .
• Musical sounds of math words -- in a CENTO
• If 2017 was a poem title . . .
• Mathematics and Valentine's Day
• Speed flunking math . . . NO, NO!
• Quantum Lyrics -- Poems

Solving for X, Searching for LIFE

     In January of this year I had the pleasure of attending a poetry reading featuring Linda Pastan and Le Hinton -- Linda Pastan's mathy poem "Algebra" is posted here and a blog SEARCH using her name can find other gems.  Pennsylvania poet Le Hinton's poem, "Baseball," appears in a 2015 posting at this link and below I offer his "Solving for X."

Solving for X     by Le Hinton

Because your father was a teacher,
he set up a blackboard to teach you math.

You were four, almost five, learning the difference
between more and less.  How to add.  When to subtract.  How
to savor a piece of candy when you got an answer exactly right.

A Multi-Author Poem Celebrating Math-People

     At the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Baltimore last Friday evening, the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics (JHM) and SIGMAA-ARTS sponsored a poetry reading.  

Moderated  by Gizem Karaali, the pre-reregistered participants included

 Lawrence M. Lesser, Sarah Glaz, Ben Orlin, Rachel Levy, Luise Kappe,

Brooke C. Johnston, Douglas Norton, Claudia Gary, JoAnne Growney

In addition to poems by participants registered in advance, the event included a "crowd-sourced" poem.  Each person attending was invited to submit two lines of poetry about math-people -- and the pairs of lines were put together into a poem that I offer below.  MANY THANKS to these participants who gave us lines.

Order of contributors (2 lines each): David Reimann, Maru Colbert, Greg Coxson,

 David Flesner, Nancy Johnston, Kate Jones, Hunter Johnston, Debra Bordeau (4 lines), 

Luise Kappe (in German—with translation at end), Margaret Kepner, Thomas Atkinson,  

Brooke Johnston, Andrew Johnston, Ximena Catpillan, Bronna Butler, Courtney Hauf,

 JoAnne Growney, Doug Norton, Sean Owen, Eric Marland

Sending THANK-YOU to all of the authors, 

               I present below our poem, "We Love Mathematics."

We Love Mathematics

Mathematicians are meeting today—
ideas unfold in space, time, and hearts. 
   Math is the language of everyone
   Any part of everything began as a sum.   

A Perfect Number

     One of the things I love to find in a poem is the surprise of a double meaning -- especially involving a mathematical term such as "group" or "zero" or "identity."  The following poem of mine aims to offer that surprise -- as it celebrates actor-inventor Hedy Lamarr while playing with the meanings of "perfect."

Looking for Mathematics in Hedy Lamarr   by JoAnne Growney

All my six husbands married me for different reasons.

                               ---Hedy Lamarr

Perhaps Hedy Lamarr married so often because six

is a perfect number – the sum of all its proper

divisors, “proper” meaning “less than six,”

“divisor” meaning “a counting number

that divides and leaves

no remainder.”

After a perfect number of husbands, there is no

remainder. Six is the smallest perfect

number, the next is twenty-eight.

And twenty-eight

is too many

husbands.

Today I head to the 2019 Joint Mathematics Meetings in Baltimore

including a Poetry Reading Friday, January 18, 7 PM

 -- hope to see you there!

The music of twelve tones -- in poems

     Inspired by the musical composition strategy twelve-tone technique -- devised by Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg (1974-1951), in which all 12 notes of the chromatic scale are sound as often as one another in a piece of music -- American poet Elizabeth Bartlett (1911-1994) has developed the twelve-tone poem.  In Bartlett's words:
       The poem consists of 12 lines, divided into couplets. 
       Each couplet contains 12 syllables, using the natural cadence of speech. 
       The accented sounds of the words are considered tones. 
       Only 12 tones are used throughout the poem, repeated various times. 
       As a result, the poem achieves a rare harmony that is purely lyrical, 
                    enriching its imagery and meaning

The following poem is on my shelf in Memory Is No Stranger (Ohio Univ. Press, 1981), a collection of Bartlett's twelve-tone poems; it also is found in the math-poetry anthology Against Infinity (Primary Press, 1979).

       The Infinite Present   by Elizabeth Bartlett

       Because I longed
       to comprehend the infinite  

A special Fibonacci poem

     A recent email from Marian Christie -- a nominally retired mathematics teacher from Aberdeenshire  -- alerted me to her very special sort of Fibonacci poem, one in which the number of letters-per-line follows the Fibonacci numbers AND the length of each word is a Fibonacci number AND the poem speaks about the objects counted by these Fibonacci numbers.

Pathways      by Marian Christie
–
O
I
am
not
going
anywhere
unaccompanied
by life’s patterns: a whorl
in a pinecone, branches on oak or elm trees, 
the petal count of a daisy, the helix at the heart of a chrysanthemum,
the shell of a nautilus swimming in the ocean. A sequence hides in the shape of
                                                                             probabilities, and in my own DNA. 

Poet's Note: In this poem the number of letters per line is determined by the Fibonacci sequence: the first line has zero letters while the last line, representing the twelfth number in the sequence, contains 89 letters. In addition, the letters of each word add up to a Fibonacci number.  

Christie's poem was first published on the UK-based website IndependentVariable.

Something or Nothing -- Thinking about Zero

     The site of the 2019 Bridges Math-Arts conference has been announced  -- it will meet in Linz, Austria next July.  This link leads to the archives of the 2018 and earlier conferences.  Each recent year a poetry reading (coordinated by Sarah Glaz) has been part of the Bridges activities -- and this year a poetry anthology also was compiled.  Here is a poem by Canadian poet Alice Major that was featured both in this year's reading and in the anthology  -- a poem that also appears, along with other math and science poems, in Major's latest collection, Welcome to the Anthropocene. (University of Alberta Press, 2018).  Major's poem examines death and, as it does so, explores various meanings of zero.

Zero divided by zero     by Alice Major

There is no right answer.

The trains of logic crash, annihilate

certainty. Zero is just as good an answer

as one. Nothingness or loneliness.

There is no right answer.    

Math Is Beautiful and So Are You

 Read on for a poem of love and mathematics! 

    This poem celebrates an upcoming wedding . . .  one of my two wonderful sons will be getting married next Saturday to a lovely and special woman -- and this delightful occasion also will bring a host of scattered family members together.  I am thrilled by all of this and offer, for readers also to celebrate, a lovely poem:

Math Is Beautiful and So Are You     by Becky Dennison Sakellariou

     If n is an even number
     then I'll kiss you goodnight right here, 
     but if the modulus k is the unique solution,
     I'll take you in my arms for the long night.  

Counting insects, counting on them . . .

     Recently I had the opportunity to vacation in southern Portugal with my older daughter and her family and there -- with clear, bright-blue skies and cooled-down night-time temperatures -- not only did we vacationers thrive but so do many insects.  Their busy behavior reminded me of their presence on the childhood farm in Pennsylvania on which I grew up and their important role as partners in the agricultural process -- pollinating and irrigating and . . . 
    And so -- jet lagged yet continuing in my appreciation of the population-mathematics of insects -- I offer below a poem of bees by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), also found here.  Another bee-poem by Dickinson posted back in August 2013 is available at this link.

The most important population   (1746)   by Emily Dickinson

       The most important population
       Unnoticed dwell,
       They have a heaven each instant
       Not any hell.

       Their names, unless you know them,
       'Twere useless tell.
       Of bumble-bees and other nations
       The grass is full.

An interesting Smithsonian article, "Bees May Understand Zero . . ." may be found here and the Washington POST has featured bees at this  recent link and this earlier one.