Monday, August 30, 2010

What is the point? -- consider Euclid

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A two-line poem by Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda (1904-73), found in my bilingual edition of Extravagaria , reminded me of the poetic nature ...
Thursday, August 26, 2010

"Two Pair" by Howard Nemerov

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This poem by Howard Nemrov (1920-1991) uses scientific terminology in ways that seem especially deft:    Two Pair    More money's l...
Monday, August 23, 2010

The Irrational Sonnet -- An Oulipian form

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An irrational sonnet has 14 lines, just as the traditional sonnet, but differs in its stanza-division and rhyme:  there are five stanzas--co...
Thursday, August 19, 2010

From Miroslav Holub -- a reflection on accuracy

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In applications of mathematics, as in other scientific research, it is important to distinguish between the precision of measurements (how ...
Wednesday, August 18, 2010

From "Red Has No Reason" -- a poem about the nature of mathematics

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My new poetry book, Red Has No Reason , is now available (from Plain View Press or  amazon.com ).  Several of the poems mention math--and o...
Monday, August 16, 2010

Poetry and applied mathematics

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Back in the 1980's when I began taking examples of poetry into my mathematics classrooms at Bloomsburg University , I think that I justi...
Saturday, August 14, 2010

Zero-sum game -- in a poem by Okigbo

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Game theory (with origins in the 1930s) was initially developed to analyze competitive decisions in which one individual does better at anot...
Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Excitement in mathematics classrooms

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Poems from three women illustrate a range of emotional content in the mathematics classroom:  Rita Dove's "Geometry" captures ...
1 comment:
Sunday, August 8, 2010

A poem of calculus (of ants on a worm)

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Philip Wexler  plays with the terminology of calculus in this poem:        The Calculus of Ants on a Worm      Swarming tiny      bodie...
Thursday, August 5, 2010

Snowballs -- growing/shrinking lines

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Today's post explores poetic structures called snowballs  developed by the Oulipo (see also March 25 posting ) and known to many throug...
Saturday, July 31, 2010

What nobody else has thought

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     Albert Szent-Gyorgyi (1893-1986) was a Hungarian Biochemist who discovered Vitamin C and won the 1937 Nobel Prize for Medicine.  Szent...
Thursday, July 29, 2010

A wedding song -- shaped by mathematics

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This posting includes a stanza from of "A Wedding on Earth" by Annie Finch .  In the poet's words: the poem has 11 stanzas wit...
1 comment:
Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Poets who Count

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For some poets, counting is part of the language of the poem. For others, counting determines the structure. Here are two poems of the forme...
1 comment:
Monday, July 26, 2010

Trouble with Math in School

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      Sad and lonely experiences seem to produce more poems than joyful ones.  And so it is easier to find a poem about a trouble in a math ...
Saturday, July 24, 2010

The infinitude of ecstacy -- a la Israel Lewis

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Israel Lewis is the pen name of a polymath who earned his living as a scientist and is a writer in his retirement.  His webpage offers a ...
Thursday, July 22, 2010

Mathematics in poetry by Nichita Stanescu

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     Though formerly a math professor, my recent teaching has involved poetry--and I have been fortunate to spend several summer months at S...
Tuesday, July 20, 2010

In the same family -- a poet and a mathematician

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When a poet and a mathematician are members of the same family, understandings result.  Ohio poet Cathryn Essinger is a twin of a mathemati...
Sunday, July 18, 2010

David Blackwell (1919 - 2010) -- and Game Theory

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     David Blackwell, the first black scholar to be admitted to the National Academy of Sciences, a probabilist and statistician, died early...
1 comment:
Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Ray Bobo's mathematical poem

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Ray Bobo , a retired Georgetown mathematics professor, has written a love poem with mathematical symbols.  And, for those of us who might be...
1 comment:
Monday, July 12, 2010

Poetry-application of The Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic

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Destructive effects of human greed and neglect on the earth's natural environment are echoed hauntingly in the repetitions within "...
Friday, July 9, 2010

Jordie Albiston -- structure behind the writing

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       I love sonnets and the one below by Jordie Albiston is a favorite of mine.      Albiston is an Australian poet with a sense of orc...
1 comment:
Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Poetry-and-Math -- Interdisciplinary Courses

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     On July 1 my posting considered math-poetry anthologies and began with a reference to Against Infinity , the discovery of which was a ...
Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Digital poetry -- Stephanie Strickland et al

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Stephanie Strickland writes with mastery of numbers, as we see in her poem below.  But numbers are only the beginning of her work.  A direc...
Thursday, July 1, 2010

Poetry with Mathematics -- Anthologies

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More than thirty years ago at a mathematics conference book exhibit I stumbled upon Against Infinity:  An Anthology of Contemporary Mathemat...
Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Mathematics, like poetry, is ART

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Doing mathematics is often misunderstood as primarily computation--an error that seems equivalent to seeing poetry writing as primarily a sp...
Monday, June 21, 2010

Poetry with mathematical symbols

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On the internet and elsewhere a variety of viewpoints are expressed about the criteria poetry should satisfy to be "mathematical."...
Friday, June 18, 2010

Three poems with the word "axiom"

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Poems that contain  "number" are numerous; those with "axiom" are less easily found.  Here are 3 of them -- by 19th cent...
Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Send your math-poems to QUARC

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Canadian journal seeks submissions from poets or fiction writers whose work makes use of metaphors from the sciences or engages scientific ...
Monday, June 14, 2010

Girls and Mathematics

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In Indiana, Pennsylvania, my senior high school advanced math teacher was Laura Church--a Barnard College graduate and a flamboyant silver-h...
Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Square comment on shoe styles

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     Recently I have returned to Silver Spring from a trip to Latvia , traveling with a friend who was born there.  My effort to find poetry...
3 comments:
Monday, June 7, 2010

Celebrate Martin Gardner (1914-2010)

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Martin Gardner described his relationship to poetry as that of "occasional versifier" -- he is the author, for example, of:    ...
Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Discovering the Secret

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In this Robert Frost couplet, “The Secret Sits,”  the poet may not have intended to speak of mathematics but his lines sing true for mathem...
1 comment:
Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Glances at Infinity

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Counter-intuitive notions are among my favorite parts of mathematics and, in considerations of infinity, these are numerous.  Recalling Zeno...
Monday, May 17, 2010

Sense and Nonsense

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     Nonsense verse has a prominent place in the poetry that mathematicians enjoy. Perhaps this is so because mathematical discovery itself...
Friday, May 14, 2010

Poems starring mathematicians - 6 (Mandelbrot)

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More familiar than the name Benoit Mandelbrot are images, like the one to the left, of the fractal that bears his name .  Born in Poland ...
1 comment:
Wednesday, May 12, 2010

The epitome -- Euler's Identity

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Mathematics is a visual language.  As with poetry, placement on the page is a key ingredient of meaning.  Here is one of my favorite visual ...
Monday, May 10, 2010

Margaret Cavendish (1623-73) -- The Circle of the Brain cannot be Squared

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Margaret Cavendish (1623-73) was a writer who published under her own name at a time when most women published anonymously.  Her writing ad...
Thursday, May 6, 2010

Mathematical 'grooks' from Piet Hein

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Piet Hein (Denmark, 1905-1996) was many-faceted--by times a philosopher, mathematician, designer, scientist, inventor of games and poet. He...
Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Poems starring mathematicians - 5

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In my own library this next poem is found (untitled) in Collected Sonnets by Edna St Vincent Millay (1892-1950),  but it also is found onl...
Thursday, April 29, 2010

A Numerical Poem (Fibonacci)

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Consider the following poem involving the Fibonacci numbers:           1/89 = .0        +                   .01        +                   ...
2 comments:
Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Poems starring mathematicians - 4

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Each of today's poems is in the voice of a student who looks back.  First, from Carol Dorf, a poem to the author of a book--written as a...
Monday, April 26, 2010

Poems starring mathematicians - 3

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Today's poems illustrate the satirical humor and rhyme that frequently inhabit poems by mathematicians. (Previous postings of poems abou...
Friday, April 23, 2010

Poems of Calculus

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In her thoughtful poem " Calculus " mathematician-poet Sarah Glaz writes of sharing with her students some of their subject...
Thursday, April 22, 2010

A Square for Earth Day

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Greetings on EARTH DAY.  Earth's inhabitants today pay a price not only for our own careless habits but also for earlier ignorance about...
Wednesday, April 21, 2010

April -- Poetry, Math, and Boxing

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April continues—both as National Poetry Month and as Mathematics Awareness Month (with theme math and sports ).  As in the April 9 posting...
Monday, April 19, 2010

Poems with Fibonacci number patterns

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In 21st century poetry, there are a variety of non-rhyming forms--and several of them have derived from the Fibonacci numbers. *  The Danis...
5 comments:
Thursday, April 15, 2010

Poems starring mathematicians - 2

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P ublished a century later than William Benjamin Smith's "The Merman and the Seraph" (see April 14 posting ) we have Crossing ...
2 comments:
Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Poems starring mathematicians - 1

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This is the first in a series of postings involving poems in which the principal subject is a mathematician.      In “The Ideal Mathematic...
1 comment:
Monday, April 12, 2010

Poetry and Mathematics -- Similarities

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HOW are mathematics and poetry similar? Often-quoted in mathematical circles are words from mathematician Karl Weierstrass (1815-97)...
2 comments:
Friday, April 9, 2010

April: along with baseball we celebrate poetry and mathematics

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Is it coincidence or design that       April  is   National Poetry Month                          and    April  is  Mathematics Awaren...
5 comments:
Thursday, April 8, 2010

Braided lines form a PANTOUM

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The pantoum is derived from a Malaysian form of interlocking four-line stanzas in which lines 2 and 4 of one stanza are used as lines 1 and...
Wednesday, March 31, 2010

John Donne's numbers

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       Perhaps best known for the religious themes in his poetry, John Donne (1572-1631) also wrote many love poems. Although the mathematic...
2 comments:
Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Miroslav Holub, poet and scientist

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Miroslav Holub (1923-1998), Czech poet and immunologist who excelled in both endeavors, is one of my favorite poets.  He combines scientif...
Monday, March 29, 2010

"Mathematical" Limericks

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A dozen, a gross, and a score Plus three times the square root of four      Divided by seven      Plus five times eleven Is nine squared...
5 comments:
Sunday, March 28, 2010

W. H. Auden's Kingdom of Number

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Some poetry is termed "mathematical" because mathematical terminology is included in the text of the poem, often to vivid effect. ...
3 comments:
Thursday, March 25, 2010

Queneau and the Oulipo

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Raymond Queneau was one of the leaders of a group of ten--primarily writers and mathematicians, primarily French--who founded a group, "...
3 comments:
Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Howard Nemerov's mathematical imagery

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GETTING IT RIGHT IN LANGUAGE -- Poets and mathematicians alike are concerned with precise statement. Two-time US Poet Laureate Howard Nemero...
1 comment:
Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Poetry of Logical Ideas

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When the NY Times failed to publish an obituary following the death of noted algebraist Amalie "Emmy" Noether , Albert Einstein c...
3 comments: