Thursday, March 29, 2012

Celebrate Emmy Noether

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     On 23 March 1882 mathematician Emmy Noether (pronounced NER-ter) was born.  On 23 March 2010  I posted the first entry in this blog  --...
Monday, March 26, 2012

Poems with Numbers

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      Hats off to the organizers and presenters at the 2012 Split This Rock Poetry Festival held in DC this past weekend.  Great poets, gr...
Friday, March 23, 2012

Round

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Round      by  Russell Edson       Where there is no shape there is round.  Round has no shape; no more than a raindrop or a human tear ...
Tuesday, March 20, 2012

A Prayer of Numbers

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     Whether our language is music or mathematics, computer code or cookery --  as we learn to love the language and treat it with good car...
Saturday, March 17, 2012

Illness and Time -- Counting on

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One of life's special opportunities came to me ten years ago in Bucharest when I had the opportunity to meet poet Ileana Mălăncioiu an...
Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Verses that count

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At about.com one finds a variety of information -- from the dates of the rapidly approaching 2012 Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington DC...
Sunday, March 11, 2012

Chatting about REAL numbers

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The term " real number " confuses many who are not immersed in mathematics.  For these, to whom 1, 2, 3 and the other counting ...
1 comment:
Thursday, March 8, 2012

Mathematics in Romanian poetry

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     When I first visited Romania, I met Doru Radu, then a teacher of English at Scoala Generala "Andre Muresanu" in Deva. And Do...
Monday, March 5, 2012

Poetic Explorations of . . . Mathematicians

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In the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics ( Volume 1, Issue 2 ), we find "Numen R ology: A Poetic Exploration of the Lives and Work of ...
Friday, March 2, 2012

Seeing Distance -- geometry in photography

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One of my favorite poem-stanza styles is a syllable-square -- it distributes the weights of the words in a way that pleases me. The poem bel...
Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Chaos and Order -- Stevens

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An article by Jeff Gordinier, " For Wallace Stevens, Hartford as Muse ," in the Travel Section of last Sunday's NY Times give...
Friday, February 24, 2012

Universal and Particular -- Szymborska

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Like Yves Bonnefoy ( 21 February 2012 posting), Wislawa Szymborska  ( who died on  1 February 2012 ) was born in 1923.  Like him she was co...
Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Universal and Particular

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Poet Yves Bonnefoy (b 1923) is one of France's greatest living poets. And Bonnefoy's university studies included mathematics. I rea...
Saturday, February 18, 2012

Langston Hughes could do anything!

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In the 1970s when I was a new professor (at Pennsylvania's Bloomsburg University), a particular colleague and I would chat occasionally ...
Thursday, February 16, 2012

2012 Split This Rock Poetry Festival -- March 22-25

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Earlybird registration ends February 22 for the 2012 Split this Rock Poetry Festival in Washington, DC, March 22-25.  Honoring poet June Jo...
Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Counting (with sadness) in Syria

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Burmese poet ko ko thett is an activist-scholar and, at present, a resident of Vienna, Austria. I became acquainted with his work through ...
Sunday, February 12, 2012

Be My Valentine

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Unlike many newspapers, the British Guardian  publishes poems -- and, on February 10, 2012, they offered a selection to celebrate the upcomi...
Friday, February 10, 2012

Recursion

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A mathematician may face a dilemma over the meaning of an ordinary term -- for words like "group" and "identity" and ...
1 comment:
Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Is Math for Women?

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At a River Poets reading at the public library in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania on December 1, 2011, Carol Ann Heckman surprised me with her poe...
Sunday, February 5, 2012

Strength from Numbers

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During March 22-25, 2012, the third Split This Rock Poetry Festival:  Poems of Provocation and Witness will be held in Washington, DC. This...
Thursday, February 2, 2012

Szymborska (1923-2012) on Statistics

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Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012)  won the 1996 Nobel Prize for literature; I am saddened by her death -- yesterday, February 1, ...
Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Counting Groundhogs

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     I grew up in a town about 25 miles from Punxsutawney, PA -- and Groundhog Day on February 2 was local-news only. This was the quiet t...
Sunday, January 29, 2012

Juxtaposition

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One of my favorite phrases (loved for the sound of it) first came to my ears during my college studies of  abstract algebra: " multipl...
Thursday, January 26, 2012

Counting the seconds -- and leap seconds

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      Keeping time is a simple matter of counting -- counting seconds, summing them into minutes, hours, days. Or is it? Recent news has i...
Monday, January 23, 2012

Counting fingers and blackbirds

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Love of numbers is common in childhood -- and traditional nursery rhymes offer chances to know numbers as playmates and friends.  "Four...
1 comment:
Friday, January 20, 2012

Statistics feels like poetry

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    Today's title comes from the following poem by statistician and poet Eveline Pye (introduced to this blog on 18 October, 2011 ).  ...
Tuesday, January 17, 2012

More statistics -- from Hiawatha

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As the author of this poem owes a debt to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, I too owe Greg Coxson -- who showed the poem to me. Hiawatha Designs...
Sunday, January 15, 2012

Average, more or less . . .

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The wit of American poet J. V. Cunningham (1911–1985) is here applied to statistics.    Meditation on Statistical Method        by J. V. ...
1 comment:
Thursday, January 12, 2012

The Function Room

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For each of us who's studied mathematics, the word "function" triggers important mathematical meanings. And so, when I read Pa...
Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Is your favorite poet a mathematician?

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     The Joint Mathematics Meetings in Boston last week gave a fine opportunity for me to connect with both mathematicians and poets, old fr...
1 comment:
Sunday, January 8, 2012

Poetry heard at JMM

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In Boston on Friday evening, January 6, at the 2012 Joint Mathematics Meetings, these folks gathered and read -- for a delighted audience in...
Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Euclid meets Broadway

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Several years ago while visiting my older son in Colorado Springs I also went to nearby Boulder where, driving along Broadway, I came to a s...
1 comment:

From 2011 -- dates, titles of posts

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List of postings January 1 - December 31, 2011 Scrolling through the 12 months of titles below may lead you to topics and poets/poems of i...
Friday, December 30, 2011

Good numbers . . .

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     My wish for the New Year 2012 is that you will have good numbers -- that your happiness will have high peaks, that your sadness and gri...
Monday, December 26, 2011

A mathematical woman

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As in an earlier posting ( 20 December 2011 ), today's feature includes verse by Lord Byron (1788-1824). This time the source is Byron...
Thursday, December 22, 2011

Counting on Christmas

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 1 1  one 1  2 two 2 1   3   three 3   3 1   4 4  four  4 4 1   5 five 5 5 5 five 5 1   6 six 6 6 six 6 6 six 6 1  7 7 7 seven 7...
Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Thoughts Suggested by a College Examination

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Just when I was convinced that mathematical subject matter appears proportionately more in modern than in classical poetry, I turned again t...
Saturday, December 17, 2011

Ruth Stone counts

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It seemed as if she might write -- and write well -- forever.  But she did not.  Moreover, poems by award-winning poet Ruth Stone (1915-201...
Wednesday, December 14, 2011

A puzzle with a partial solution

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     When we have experiences near to each other, we may try to connect them. We form superstitions. "Bad things come in threes"...
2 comments:
Sunday, December 11, 2011

Poetry captures math student

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This sonnet retells a familiar story -- a teacher influences a student's choice of studies. Prior to reading, many in mathematics may w...
1 comment:
Thursday, December 8, 2011

Monsieur Probabilty

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In recent months, I have encountered a variety of poems about mathematicians (Links to several of these are provided at the end of this post...
2 comments:
Monday, December 5, 2011

Poetic Pascal Triangle

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First published in 2007 in Mathematics Magazine , Caleb Emmons' poem "Dearest Blaise" has the form of (Blaise) Pascal's Tr...
2 comments:
Saturday, December 3, 2011

Mathematics works with witchcraft

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T. A. Noonan  sometimes uses the languages of mathematics and computer science as tools in her experimental poetry, gathered in her collecti...
Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Echoes of childhood rhymes

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For those of us who live and breathe mathematics, there is much of it that affects us deeply.  Even those of us whose mathematics is mostly ...
Sunday, November 27, 2011

How much for a digit of PI?

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Scottish poet Brian McCabe writes playfully of numbers.  In the following poem he imagines an auction of the digits of   π .    Three Poi...
Thursday, November 24, 2011

Open and Closed -- Tomas Transtromer

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A background in mathematics gives my enchantment with words a special twist. Each time I see familiar math terms in a poem I layer their ma...
Monday, November 21, 2011

Reading the Rubaiyat

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Omar Khayyam (1048-1131) was a mathematician who wrote poetry.  Here are two quatrains from his Rubaiyat .          XLVI    For in and ...
Friday, November 18, 2011

Equivalence

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In telling the time, we commonly refer to hours that differ by a multiple of 12 using the same number. Sixty hours after 3 o'clock it is...
Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Portrait of Max Dehn

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Today I offer a poem by Portuguese mathematician  F. J. Craveiro de Carvalho -- its initial English publication was in Topology Atlas , 2005...
Sunday, November 13, 2011

Portraits of a mathematician

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Ideas for this posting began with my post on  30 October 2011 in which I selected 7 favorite lines of poetry as a sort of self-portrait.  T...
Thursday, November 10, 2011

Mathematics of desire

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Last Monday evening, I listened with pleasure to Pennsylvania (Fogelsville) poet Barbara Crooker read at Cafe Muse (with Meredith Davies H...
Monday, November 7, 2011

Mathematician-Poet Glaz

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     Sarah Glaz , a professor-mathematician at the University of Connecticut -- and a poet -- is at the forefront of appreciation and advoca...
Saturday, November 5, 2011

Four colors will do

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     As I work with Gizem Karaali, an editor of the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics , to plan a reading of mathematical poetry at the JM...
2 comments:
Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Division by zero

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The November 2011 issue of the Scottish ezine, The Bottle Imp , is just out and it includes my review of poet Brian McCabe's Zero ( P...
Sunday, October 30, 2011

What can 7 objects say? Or 100?

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      A friend, a high school art teacher, had one of her students paint a portrait of her -- not of her bodily self but a still life of the...
2 comments:
Friday, October 28, 2011

Music on the hypotenuse

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Dr. Cai Tianxin is a professor of mathematics (specializing in number theory) at Zhejiang University, China. He also is an accomplished and...
Thursday, October 27, 2011

Submit math-science poetry

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During the month of November, the online journal Talking Writing is seeking submission of poetry with connections to mathematics and the sc...
2 comments:
Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Chaos Over the Hors d'Oeuvres

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Some systems of equations can produce vast changes in output with only small changes in input.  Or not.  This sensitivitiy to initial condit...
Sunday, October 23, 2011

Permutations and Centos

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A Cento is a collage poem made of lines taken from other poems -- such as a sonnet composed of lines from fourteen of Millay's sonnets, ...
Thursday, October 20, 2011

A whole and its parts

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     Aristotle may have been the first to assert that a whole is more than the sum of its parts .  Mathematics textbooks are likely to say ...
Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Things the fingers know

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Blogger Peter Cameron sent me a link to an lively article, " Eveline Pye: Poetry in Numbers "  in the September 2011 issue of the...
2 comments:
Sunday, October 16, 2011

A small Fib

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My dilemma    I've    lost    the art    of careful    thought, asea in floods    of  trivial   information.               by JoA...
Thursday, October 13, 2011

Hamilton -- mathematician, poet, Irishman

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     October 15-22 is Maths Week in Ireland -- as I learned from this article in the Irish Times  celebrating maths and the Irish mathematic...
Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Like poetry, mathematics is beautiful

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     Congratulations to Justin Southey who is completing his doctoral studies in mathematics at the University of Johannesburg under the dir...
Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Numbers from the Piano

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     Of all of the things we might try to say when we sit down to write a poem, which are the ones we should choose?  Sometimes we may say w...
Sunday, October 9, 2011

Counting the women

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     The stimulus for this posting appeared a few weeks ago in the Washington Post -- in an article that considers the loneliness of women...
Saturday, October 8, 2011

How I won the raffle

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Dannie Abse is a deservedly celebrated Welsh poet -- and before his retirement he was also  a physician.  I first saw "How I Won the R...
Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Action at a distance

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One of the great things about writing this blog is the people who have -- out of the blue and across the miles -- sent along a great poem or...
1 comment:
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: