Friday, September 30, 2011

The square root of Everest

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Of the poets who frequently use mathematical ideas in their work, Howard Nemerov (1920-1991) is one of my favorites.  Recently, while brows...
1 comment:
Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Math meets Dr Seuss

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Blogger Sue VanHattum ( MathMamaWrites ) sent me a link to a posting on another blog, kGuac, on which she found a Dr Seussical expression o...
Monday, September 26, 2011

Learning to count

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The childhood of Romanian poet Nichita Stanescu (1933-1983) took place during World War II and his teen years during his country's adju...
Saturday, September 24, 2011

Mathematical theorems tornadoing

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This poem is fun!    Horse’s Adventure      by Jason Bredle      The horse discovered a gateway to another    dimension, and with noth...
Thursday, September 22, 2011

The wealth of ambiguity

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When we read these lines by Robert Burns  (1759-1796),      Oh my luv is like a red, red rose,      That's newly sprung in June . . ....
Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Poetry at JMM -- in Boston 6-Jan-2012

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Call for Submissions:      The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics will host a reading of poetry-with-mathematics on Friday, January 6, 5-7 ...
2 comments:
Sunday, September 18, 2011

Baseball, math, and poetry

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The end of summer approaches and, with it, the end of the baseball season.  This blog celebrated the triplet (baseball, mathematics, poetry)...
Friday, September 16, 2011

Best words in the best order

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     Writers of mathematics strive for clear and careful wording, especially in the formulation of definitions. Well-specified definitions ...
Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Analysis of a sacred site

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Poet Allison Hedge Coke descends from moundbuilders and mixed ancestry from several Native American communities with several Europoean ones...
Sunday, September 11, 2011

A Piece of Coffee -- Stein with some math terms

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I love the poetry of Gertrude Stein.  Perhaps this is so because I have never taken a class in which her work was taught and I have never re...
Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Symmetric 4 x 4 square

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Martin Gardner (1914-2010) studied philosophy and was interested in everything.  For 25 years he wrote the "Mathematical Games" f...
Sunday, September 4, 2011

Applying statistics . . .

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From Seattle poet Kathleen Flenniken , a sensitive application of the normal distribution to the population of participants in an elementary...
3 comments:
Friday, September 2, 2011

Two ways to compute 1/3

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Here, from  Betsy Devine and Joel E Cohen , is a "mathematical" limerick:         An Integral Limerick
1 comment:
Tuesday, August 30, 2011

This plane of earthly love

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Poet Joan Mazza  celebrates qualities mathematical:      To a Mathematician Lover      by Joan Mazza    As we embark on this plane    o...
Saturday, August 27, 2011

Earthquake and Hurricane

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It would not be easy to argue that a poem whose numbers merely identify its stanzas is "mathematical" but "Curriculum Vitae,...
Friday, August 26, 2011

350: Science --> Poetry --> Music

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350 parts per million is the "safe upper limit" for CO 2 in our atmosphere presented by NASA scientist Jim Hansen in December 20...
Wednesday, August 24, 2011

A thousand and fifty-one waves

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Twenty-five years ago I had an enormous appetite for poems by Stevie Smith (1902-1971).  I loved the way that they seemed so unstudied -- p...
1 comment:
Friday, August 19, 2011

Half-twist and link -- in a Sestina

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     Mobius strip         by Heidi Willamson      A simple science trick to try at home.      Half-twist a slip of paper. Link the ends ...
Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Lieber's INFINITY -- poetic prose

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It has surprised me to discover that some of my best-remembered learning took place at the hands of teachers I did not particularly like.  O...
Monday, August 15, 2011

Some cat!

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My title is a borrowing from E. B. White's Charlotte's Web -- which I saw recently with grandchildren at Glen Echo Park's Adven...
1 comment:
Wednesday, August 10, 2011

The hypotenuse of an isosceles triangle

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Detroit poet, Philip Levine , has been selected as the new Poet Laureate of the United States. Selected by the librarian of Congress (Jame...
Monday, August 8, 2011

Can a mathematician see red?

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Held late in July, this year's 2011 Bridges (Math-Arts) Conference in Coimbra, Portugal included a poetry reading for which I'd be...
Friday, August 5, 2011

Banach's Match Box Problem

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A poetry collection by Susan Case (see also 5 July 2011 posting )  --  The Scottish Cafe ( Slapering Hole Press , 2002) -- celebrates the ...
Thursday, August 4, 2011

Cantor Ternary Set

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The second issue of the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics   has recently been posted -- with more new poems .  The first issue contained a...
Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Puzzle play

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In volume 4 of The World of Mathematics  ( James R Newman, Editor; Dover 2003 ), in a section entitled "Amusements, Puzzles, and Fanci...
1 comment:
Friday, July 29, 2011

Mathematical Induction -- principle, perhaps poem

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One of my teachers -- I think it was Mr Smith in "College Algebra" during my freshman year at Westminster -- gave me these words t...
Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Bridges in Coimbra

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     Newton's binomial is as beautiful as Venus de Milo.      What happens is that few people notice it.                 -- Fernando...
2 comments:
Sunday, July 24, 2011

Little Infinite Poem

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   Little Infinite Poem        by  Federico Garcia Lorca                For Luis Cardoza y Aragón       To take the wrong road    is t...
Thursday, July 21, 2011

The wind, counting

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     Who can ever forget      listening to the wind go by      counting its money      and throwing it away?
Monday, July 18, 2011

Finding a square root

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Here is an old poem (1849) by George Van Waters that offers instruction on finding a square root . This process was part of my junior high l...
Friday, July 15, 2011

I have dreamed geometry

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   Descartes        by Jorge Luis Borges    I am the only man on earth, but perhaps there is neither earth nor man.    Perhaps a god is ...
Monday, July 11, 2011

Seeking a universal language

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Is mathematics a universal language?  Not only is this universality often postulated but also it was said  -- some decades back -- that devi...
Friday, July 8, 2011

Ancestry -- what counts

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Etheridge Knight began writing poetry while an inmate at the Indiana State Prison and published his first collection, Poems from Prison, i...
Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Mathematicians at work

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     About her collecton, The Scottish Café ( Slapering Hol Press , 2002), Susan Case offers this note:      This series of poems is loose...
Saturday, July 2, 2011

Mathematicians divide

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One of my fine graduate courses at Hunter College was a "World Poetry" course taught by William Pitt Root .  One of our texts was ...
Wednesday, June 29, 2011

5 x 5 and 6 x 6

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Many poets have found the sonnet to be an ideal poetic form -- its iambic pentameter lines are like five heartbeats assembled in a single b...
Sunday, June 26, 2011

The Joys of Mathematics

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   The Joys of Mathematics      by Peter Boyle    At fifty I will begin my count towards the infinite numbers.    At negative ninety nin...
Thursday, June 23, 2011

Creation Myth on a Mobius Band

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On the   website of Bert-Jaap Koops , I found this small poem by a poet I admire greatly, Howard Nemerov (1920-1991) .      Creation Myth ...
Monday, June 20, 2011

Something for nothing

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     Among my favorite mathematical ideas are the seeming-paradoxes -- notions that require a twist and a turn and a leap before one can say...
Friday, June 17, 2011

Circling -- with Rilke

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Ranier Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was born in Prague but emigrated to Germany and is one of the great modern lyric poets.   The following Rilk...
Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Found in Flatland

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Over the years I have shared with friends and students my copy of Edwin Abbott 's Flatland (first published in England in 1884) and, al...
Monday, June 13, 2011

Stanescu - poetic mathematics

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Today I found a link to a recent article, "Matematica şi poezia ," that considers commonalities among the arts and mathematics and...
1 comment:
Sunday, June 12, 2011

Lagrange points

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The Italian-French mathematician Josef Lagrange discovered the existence of five special "Lagrange points" (aka Lagrangian points...
Thursday, June 9, 2011

Counting on things -- a prose poem

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Russell Edson is one of the contemporary masters of the prose poem (a poem whose words are organized into paragraphs rather than stanzas)....
Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Right Triangle

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The shape of a poem influences our reading of it -- short lines cause reading with lots of pauses whereas we read long lines quickly to get ...
1 comment:
Sunday, June 5, 2011

Math lyrics -- Lehrer et al

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Mathematicians with poetic tendency often use their word-talents to write song-lyrics rather than poems; a master of the song-writing art wa...
Thursday, June 2, 2011

A square poem of Romania

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When I'm working on a poem that resists my efforts to express what I must say, sometimes I turn to the square for a rescue -- that is, I...
1 comment:
Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Fear of math

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California poet Carol Dorf  is a high school math teacher (and has taught in a science museum) -- and images from math and science permeate ...
Monday, May 30, 2011

Once a student of Euclid

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The Chair     by Charles Simic The chair was once a student of Euclid.
Friday, May 27, 2011

The Bridges of Konigsberg

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From the August 1997 issue of The Mathematical Intelligencer , we have this poem by Judith Saunders  about a long-standing puzzle solved so...
Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Hikmet -- painting with numbers

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Living is no laughing matter . . .  These are words of Turkish poet, playwright, novelist and memoirist Nazim Hikmet (1902-63), who spent ...
Sunday, May 22, 2011

Spacetime

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   Spacetime      by Miroslav Holub (1932-1998)    When I grow up and you get small,    then --
Thursday, May 19, 2011

Personal geometry

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We have recently passed the first anniversary of the death (6 May 2010) of Elena Shvarts, one of Russia's finest contemporary poets. H...
Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Poems with permutations

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     Below, in the  May 16 posting, this blog considered all of the permutations of a few words -- in search of "the best" arrang...
3 comments:
Monday, May 16, 2011

Which is the BEST order?

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At Bartleby.com , we find  a quote from Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) which says, in part " ... poetry—the best words in their b...
2 comments:
Friday, May 13, 2011

Would rationalists wear sombreros?

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This final section of "Six Significant Landscapes," by attorney and insurance executive (and poet) Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), p...
Wednesday, May 11, 2011

If p, then q.

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     Today's posting (as also on April 13 )  presents variations of the conditional statment -- a sentence of the form "If ___, th...
Monday, May 9, 2011

Poetry generators

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Blogger  edde addad  had an undergraduate major in creative writing -- and later earned a PhD in computer science.  He has written about and...
Friday, May 6, 2011

Permuting words and and enumerating poems

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Caleb Emmons teaches mathematics at Pacific University.  Here is his very-clever description of the requirements for a poem to be a sestina...
1 comment:
Wednesday, May 4, 2011

A jar in Tennessee

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     Several of my early insights concerning the connections between poetry and mathematics grew from ideas presented by poet Jonathan Holde...
Friday, April 29, 2011

Forgetful Number

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A lovely poem about more than a number . . .     Forgetful Number   by Vasko Popa     Once upon a time there was a number     Pure and ...
Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Perpendicularity -- a symmetric relation

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     In 2010 both my October 13 and November 20 posts feature small poems by the French poet Guillevic (1909-97). Strongly drawn to his...
Saturday, April 23, 2011

Attitudes of Numbers

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     I like Bruce Snider 's "The Certainty of Numbers" (which you may already have found online at The Poetry Foundation web...
Thursday, April 21, 2011

Earth Day, 2011

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      My father, a farmer, was respectful of our earth's resources.  Replenish what you take , he taught.   But some of us consume witho...
Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Two and four and eight and birds

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Pennsylvanian  Craig Czury works as a travelling poet in schools, homeless shelters, prisons, mental hospitals, and community centers aroun...
Monday, April 18, 2011

Teaching math with a poem

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Sarah Glaz is an algebraist (University of Connecticut) who uses poetry to teach mathematics. At her web page , scroll down to "Recent...
Sunday, April 17, 2011

A picture should extend beyond its frame

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Since April is Mathematics Awareness Month -- with theme "Unraveling Complex Systems" -- this blogger has been seeking out poems ...
Thursday, April 14, 2011

Finding poems with "numbers"

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     Here's a quick and enjoyable activity:      Go to the website for The Poetry Foundation.    Browse for a bit and, when you have co...
Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Conditional statements

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The "If ... , then ... ." statements of mathematical theorems are often termed "conditionals." We have, for example, the...
1 comment:
Sunday, April 10, 2011

What can mathematics do?

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For many, mathematics offers interpretive links between a mind and the truths it seeks to know,  the same role that a story plays in this po...
2 comments:
Thursday, April 7, 2011

A poetic perspective on algebra

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     Last Monday (April 4), the Washington Post had an article concerning the value of Algebra II   as a predictor of college and work succ...
Tuesday, April 5, 2011

What color is 3?

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     Long before there were six-digit hexadecimal codes for color (red #FF0000 or green #000800), there were paint-by-number craft activiti...
2 comments:
Sunday, April 3, 2011

April -- month of poetry and mathematics

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April is both National Poetry Month and  Mathematics Awareness Month   (with theme this year being "Unraveling Complex Systems")....
Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Coleridge: A Mathematical Problem

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 "A Mathematical Problem" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge  (1772-1834) -- found online at Elite Skills Classics  -- uses verse to descr...
Sunday, March 27, 2011

The Nightmare of an Unsolved Problem

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Back in the 1980s when I first met the Collatz conjecture in a number theory textbook it was stated this way:      Start with any whole nu...
Thursday, March 24, 2011

Numbers are more than numbers

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Today, a poem in three parts, "Trouble with Numbers" -- from the collection Mathematics and Other Poems by  William Wall . 
Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Celebrating Newman's "World of Mathematics"

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Lionel Deimel is a database and Web site designer, a steam locomotive enthusiast, a cat lover, an essayist and a poet who maintains an ecle...
Sunday, March 20, 2011

Counting: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, . . .

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At Peter Cameron's Blog, " Counting the things that need to be counted ," the July 14, 2010 entry contains a reflective poem...
Friday, March 18, 2011

Who are our prophets?

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Here is the opening sentence of an article , "Mathematicians and Poets," by Cai Tianxin, a mathematics professor at Zhejiang Unive...
Wednesday, March 16, 2011

9 9-square stanzas

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In the current (March 21, 2011) issue of The New Yorker ( pages 46-47 ) may be found the poem "Green Farmhouse Chairs" by Donald ...
Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Remembering Pi-day, a day late

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Yesterday (3-14) was Pi-day, but my recent thoughts have been focused on my math-teacher son Eric (who has acute pancreatitis) and his famil...
Sunday, March 13, 2011

Teaching Math

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When I was a new professor in the 1970s at Bloomsburg University (then Bloomsburg State College) my colleague PH and I discussed our teachin...
Monday, March 7, 2011

Numerology

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On her website Deanna Rubin describes herself this way, "I have a degree in Technical Writing and Computer Science from Carnegie Mello...
1 comment:
Friday, March 4, 2011

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics -- V1, Issue 1

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A new door has opened for those of us interested in the humanistic aspects of mathematics.  Under the able leadership of editors Mark Huber ...
3 comments:
Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Perfect as soap bubbles

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An alert to today's poem came from Greg Coxson, a University of Wisconsin-educated, Silver Spring-based, radar engineer who loves mathem...
Sunday, February 27, 2011

Immense polygons of evening

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Sometimes one wonderful line makes me fall in love with a poem. I offer the following -- in which the title first draws me in and then ...
Thursday, February 24, 2011

Counting rhymes -- Catalan, Bell numbers

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     In mathematics, the Catalan numbers (named for Belgian mathematician Eugène Charles Catalan , 1814–1894, and beginning with 1, 1, 2, ...
Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Poems of set paradox and spatial dimension

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Universal Paradox      by Sandra DeLozier Coleman      One gigantic set made of all that there is      Boggles the mind with paradoxes. ...
Sunday, February 20, 2011

Black History Month -- celebrate Haynes and Hughes

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Living on the border of Washington DC I am exposed to items of local history for our nation's capital.  One such item involves the ...
Friday, February 18, 2011

Srinivasa Ramanujan

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One of the most intriguing tales in the modern history of mathematics involves Indian-born mathematician and genius Srinivasa Ramanujan (18...
4 comments:
Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Thinking about Thinking

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The question of what it means to think is never far from my focus -- and is particularly on my mind during these days that the computer Wats...
1 comment:
Monday, February 14, 2011

Puzzles, puzzlers, and parody

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     For lots of fun, go to plus online magazine at this link to find a poem that requires a knight's tour of a chess board for you to...
Saturday, February 12, 2011

Loving a mathematician (Valentine's Day and . . . )

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A perfect way to celebrate Valentine's Day -- especially for you who enjoy mathematics --  read (aloud and to each other) some "p...
Thursday, February 10, 2011

Dividing by Zero

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Fairy godmothers have their magic wands and mathematician have division by zero as a way to make the impossible happen -- for example, we ca...
Tuesday, February 8, 2011

How much math does a math-poem need?

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Poems offered in this blog vary in the levels of mathematics they contain.  One mathematical reader commented privately that in some of the ...