Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Fixing something wrong

›
          If there's something           wrong with the third           act,   it's   really           in  the  first  act. Th...
Sunday, July 27, 2014

Each equation is a playful catch . . .

›
A mathematician is probably too close to her subject matter to speak playfully about it -- and thus she, even more than others, appreciates...
Friday, July 25, 2014

Poems with "equation" in the title

›
     One of the ways to explore this blog is to go to the right hand column and find the instruction, SEARCH .      A few moments ago I did...
Saturday, July 19, 2014

Mathematicians are not free to say . . .

›
The poetry of a mathematician is constrained by the definitions she knows from mathematics.  Even though all but one of the prime integers i...
Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Palindromes

›
     Palindromic numbers are not uncommon  -- recently (in the July 12 posting ) power-of-eleven palindromes are mentioned.  Palindromic p...
Saturday, July 12, 2014

Prove It

›
After observing that                1  =  1 and         1 + 3  =  4 and         1 + 3 + 5  =  9 and         1 + 3 + 5 + 7  =  16 and  ...
Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Looking back . . .

›
I have been visiting my hometown of Indiana, Pennsylvania and not finding time to complete a new post -- and so I have looked back.  On July...
Sunday, July 6, 2014

Poetry as Pure Mathematics

›
A recent email from Portuguese mathematician-poet F J "Francisco" Craveiro de Carvalho brought a 40-year-old stanza to my attent...
Thursday, July 3, 2014

Mathematician and Poet

›
     Should I do it?  Should I do a blog post on a novel by Brazilian poet Hilda Hilst (1930-2004) that I have begun to read but don't ...
Monday, June 30, 2014

A recent butterfly effect

›
The term butterfly effect has entered everyday vocabulary from the mathematics of chaos theory and refers to the possibility of a major eve...
Friday, June 27, 2014

Of all geometries, feathery is best . . .

›
The title for this post comes from Twinzilla ( The Word Works , 2014), by Charleston poet Barbara Hagerty .  The title character of this co...
Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Is mathematics discovered or invented?

›
My neighbor, Glenn, is fond of asking math-folks that he meets the question "Is mathematics discovered or invented?" -- and when h...
2 comments:
Friday, June 20, 2014

Three thousand, and two

›
Here is a small poem richly vivid with the contrasts of opposites:                  beside a stone three                  thousand years ...
Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Found: Elementary Calculus

›
Here is a poem by Saskatchewan poet Karen Solie .        Found     by Karen Solie        Elementary Calculus                 From    ...
Saturday, June 14, 2014

Number theory is like poetry

›
     Austrian-born Olga Taussky-Todd (1906-1995) was a noted and prolific mathematician who left her homeland for London in 1935 and moved ...
1 comment:
Wednesday, June 11, 2014

And Now I See . . .

›
     One of the ways we overcome our nervous shyness about our disabilities is by talking about them, and writing about them.  And by encoun...
Sunday, June 8, 2014

Impossible Things Before Breakfast

›
Literary works by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898, aka Lewis Carroll ) are crammed with mentions of mathematics.   One of my favorites ...
Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Behind the cards -- mathematics

›
A couple of weeks ago at an MAA math lecture by Alissa Crans on the Catalan numbers , I sat near card-trick mathematician Colm Mulcahy .  ...
Friday, May 30, 2014

Squirrel Arithmetic

›
     My maternal grandfather, James Edgar Black (1871-1931) was a western Pennsylvanian, a carpenter, and a man I never knew.  But Ed, one o...
Thursday, May 29, 2014

Phenomenal Woman

›
Yesterday morning Maya Angelou (1928-2014) left us. But she has not left us alone.  Her voice is with us, cheering us to be more than we wer...
2 comments:
Sunday, May 25, 2014

How many grains of sand?

›
Recently one of my friends used "all the grains of sand" as an example of an infinite set "because it is impossible to count ...
1 comment:
Friday, May 23, 2014

Math rap

›
     Harry Baker is a Slam Champion who studies Maths at Bristol University, UK -- and his poetry sometimes features math, often having fu...
Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Public Image of a Mathematician

›
From John Dawson -- a professor emeritus of mathematics at the Penn State York campus and well-known for his publications in mathematical l...
Friday, May 16, 2014

Pound on poetry and mathematics

›
HERE at PoetryFoundation.org we find an article by Carl Sandburg (1878-1967), published in POETRY Magazine in 1916, in which Sandburg of...
Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Land without a square

›
Here is a bit of light verse from the pen of John Updike (1932-2009). ZULUS LIVE IN LAND  WITHOUT A SQUARE      by John Updike       ...
Saturday, May 10, 2014

Barbie (b 1959) said (c 1990) "math is hard"

›
On April 24 I had the pleasure of reading at the Nora School with Martin Dickinson and Michele Wolf .  Back in March I had posted Dickinson...
Wednesday, May 7, 2014

May 6, 1954

›
I learned about it via a news broadcast on Pittsburgh radio station KDKA and, for some reason, the event stuck firmly in my memory.  I was 1...
Sunday, May 4, 2014

A pure mathematician (not!)

›
Poet Arthur Guiterman (1871-1943) was known for his humorous verse. Here is "A Pure Mathematician" -- a poem that stereotypes ma...
Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Math, Magic, Mystery -- and so few women

›
Today, April 30, is the final day of Mathematics Awareness Month 2014 ; this year's theme has been "Mathematics, Magic and Mystery...
Monday, April 28, 2014

Words that warn

›
     Somewhere in a high school English class was a small topic that intrigues me still -- "questions that expect the answer 'yes...
Friday, April 25, 2014

Too many selves

›
In my childhood home, numbers were used with care and precision.  There would be teasing when I would use the adverb "too" --- as ...
Monday, April 21, 2014

A Cento from Arcadia

›
Last week I had the enjoyable privilege of visiting with mathematician-poet Marion Cohen 's math-lit class, " Truth and Beauty ...
Sunday, April 20, 2014

Remembering Nina Cassian

›
Exiled Romanian poet Nina Cassian (1924-2014) died last week in Manhattan.  Cassian was an outspoken poet whom I admired for her political...
Friday, April 18, 2014

Poetry of Romania - Nora School, Apr 24

›
     During several summers teaching conversational English to middle-school students in Deva, Romania, I became acquainted with the work of...
Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Dimensions of a soul

›
In the poem below, Young Smith uses carefully precise terms of Euclidean geometry to create a vivid interior portrait.      She Considers...
Saturday, April 12, 2014

A Vector Space Poem

›
     As a Columbia undergraduate, media artist Millie Niss (1973-2009) majored in mathematics and was enrolled in a math PhD program at Bro...
Thursday, April 10, 2014

Fractal Geometry

›
Lee Felice Pinkas is one of the founding editors of cellpoems -- a poetry journal distributed via text message.  I found her poem,"Th...
Monday, April 7, 2014

April Celebrates Poetry and Mathematics

›
On April 1 (the first day of National Poetry Month and Mathematics Awareness Month ) Science writer Stephen Ornes offered a guest post at...
Saturday, April 5, 2014

Logic in limericks

›
In these lines, Sandra DeLozier Coleman (who participated in the math-poetry reading at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Baltimore in Janu...
Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Can you SEE the monument?

›
Links to non-intersecting celebrations of April as National Poetry Month      and      Mathematics Awareness Month are available here ...
Sunday, March 30, 2014

Split This Rock 2014 was great!

›
  Split This Rock calls poets to a greater role in public life  and fosters a national network of socially engaged poets .  Split thi...
Thursday, March 27, 2014

Women's History -- celebrate Caroline Herschel

›
     In the sixties when I spent a year at Bucknell University, I was a member of the "Department of Astronomy and Mathematics," a...
2 comments:
Sunday, March 23, 2014

Homage to Euclid

›
In my preceding post ( 20 March 2014 ) Katharine Merow's poem tells of the new geometries  developed with variations of Euclid's ...
Thursday, March 20, 2014

One geometry is not enough

›
Writer Katharine Merow is in the Publications Department of the Washington DC headquarters of the MAA ( Mathematical Association of America...
Sunday, March 16, 2014

Making something of nothing

›
     Was zero invented or discovered?  When and how?  By whom?  In "The Origin of Zero" -- an article published in 2009 in in Scie...
Thursday, March 13, 2014

Tomorrow is Pi Day

›
     Tomorrow is Pi Day and I offer no new poems but supply links to several previous posts.  Poetry of π may be found on 23 August 2010 ...
Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Tragedy of the Commons

›
Thinking in syllable-squares, recalling ecologist Garrett Hardin (1915-2003) and his 1968 wisdom, " Tragedy of the Commons ." ...
Saturday, March 8, 2014

SHE measures the heavens . . .

›
Today is International Women's Day, celebrated with a charming video at google.com and here with lines from Enheduanna (2285-2250 BCE)...
Wednesday, March 5, 2014

A poetry album by Lucille Clifton

›
March is Women's History Month and here, today, I celebrate by acknowledging a special woman, Lucille Clifton (1936-2010).  From 1979–...
Sunday, March 2, 2014

Sociology of Numbers

›
Robert Dawson is a mathematics professor at St Mary's University in Halifax, Nova Scotia -- an active mathematician who complements his...
Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Long division is difficult . . .

›
Last Monday included a visit with old friends of whom I see too little, Silver Spring artist Mark Behme -- with whom I did some art-poetry ...
Sunday, February 23, 2014

Angles in Alaska

›
Last Thursday evening I was honored to read in Takoma Park's Third Thursday poetry series -- along with poets Judy Neri and Kathleen O...
Thursday, February 20, 2014

Excitement of Proving a Theorem

›
Wow!  From first sighting, I have loved this description:        I prove a theorem and the house expands:        the windows jerk free to...
Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Wartime recurrence

›
In mathematics, it is not unusual to define an entity using a recurrence relation.  For example, in defining powers of a positive integer: ...
Thursday, February 13, 2014

Mother Courage -- and speaking of opposites

›
     Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) was a poet , but I have not found mathematics in his poems.  Still, I want to note here a fantastic perform...
Monday, February 10, 2014

To love, in perfect syllables

›
     While looking for Valentine verse with a math connection, I opened my copy of The Complete Illustrated Works of Lewis Carroll (Chancel...
Friday, February 7, 2014

Love and Mathematics -- Please be my Valentine!

›
Poet extraordinaire Maxine Kumin (1925-2014) died yesterday.   Here is a link to a wonderful eleven of her poems from Persimmon Tree . ...
Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Six Million

›
       Sometimes numbers become labels for particular events.  When I was growing up, all of us knew 1492 as a label for the discovery of A...
Sunday, February 2, 2014

Forecasting snow and poetry

›
Snowbound is that other world in which no schedules sit and no ambitions flare to interrupt the bluest sky and whitest field and coldest ...
Friday, January 31, 2014

On shoulders of giants . . .

›
     Washington, DC is a city rich with both poetry and mathematics.  Last Tuesday evening I attended a Mathematical Association of America ...
Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Little Boxes

›
It is hard to know what to say. Pete Seeger died yesterday at age 94.   94 = 2 x 47.  47 is prime. Here is a link to Pete singing "...

Graffiti Calculus

›
     In my dreams I am an artist -- a cartoonist, perhaps, or a graffiti artist -- so skilled with lines and curves and so clever that my ar...
Saturday, January 25, 2014

Mathematics is like . . .

›
For angling may be said to be so like the mathematics, that it can never be fully learnt; at least not so fully,  but that there will s...
Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Extraneous -- and so on

›
     Since my junior high math days, when I first heard the word "extraneous," I have loved the sound of it, the feel of my mouth ...
2 comments:
Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Word problems

›
       Scarcity:  Why Having Too Little Means So Much (a Times book by S. Mullainathan and E. Shafir, released last September) considers n...
Sunday, January 19, 2014

Poems and primes

›
Friday morning, 1-17-2014, looking north from the Baltimore Convention Center        This past week I enjoyed Thursday and Friday at ...
Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Poetry-with-math, Jan 17, Baltimore

›
Please join us!  A Reading of Poetry with Mathematics   Friday,  January 17, 2014   4:30 - 6:30 PM  Room 308  Baltimore Convention Cent...
2 comments:
Monday, January 13, 2014

Writing mathy poems - a student activity

›
On the web-page of mathematician-poet Sarah Glaz I found a link to this file of math-related poems that she prompted students to write whe...
Friday, January 10, 2014

The discipline of mathematics

›
This poem remembers one of my students.        The Prince of Algebra       by JoAnne Growney        Madam Professor,        let me intro...
Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Martin Gardner, again

›
     This past weekend a review by Teller (magician of the Penn & Teller team) of an autobiography of Martin Gardner appeared in the ...
2 comments:
Friday, January 3, 2014

Count what counts

›
When I visited Iceland last month, I looked in the bookstores of Reykjavik for bilingual (Icelandic-English) poetry collections; I found non...