Sunday, November 30, 2014

Geometry of Love

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     A couple of weeks ago my "Google Alert" linked me to a posting of a science poem concerning "the geometry of love."...
Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Giving thanks for poems

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     As Thanksgiving approaches I am thankful not only for many blessings but also for the numbers I use to count them -- eight grandchildre...
Friday, November 21, 2014

The Math Lady Sings

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     One of my daily emails results from a Google Alert -- which I have set up to let me know of new web-postings (or old information newly...
Tuesday, November 18, 2014

In Praise of Fractals

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     Philosopher Emily Grosholz is also a poet -- a poet who often writes of mathematics. Tessellations Publishing has recently (2014) pub...
Friday, November 14, 2014

Imaginary Number

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Last week (on November 6) I was invited to read some of my poems at the River Poets reading in Bloomsburg, PA ( where I lived and taught ...
Tuesday, November 11, 2014

In college she studied mathematics

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     In the third paragraph of the Wikipedia bio for Marguerite Duras (1914-1996), we read "At 17, Marguerite went to France, her pare...
Sunday, November 9, 2014

Composite or Prime?

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 Her age  is 9.   Is that 9 composite or prime?      I have a wonderful collection of grandchildren and am continually on the l...
Wednesday, November 5, 2014

A big voice, Galway Kinnell (1927-2014)

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     Last week master poet Galway Kinnell died ( NYTimes obituary ).  One finds a detailed bio and a baker’s dozen of his best poems at the ...
Sunday, November 2, 2014

Poetry from the words of Lord Kelvin

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Do not imagine that mathematics  is hard and crabbed, and repulsive  to common sense.  It is merely the etherealization of common...
Thursday, October 30, 2014

Tomorrow is Halloween

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Typing Halloween in this blog's SEARCH Box will lead you to a 2010 posting of "Ghost Stories Written"  -- an algebra-related p...
Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Counting into the Future . . .

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     Remember that you have only until November 1 to submit a winning "poem of provocation and witness" to the Split This Rock Poe...
Sunday, October 26, 2014

Dimensions of Discovery

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Along the one-dimensional straight line there are points and segments but no curves or squares. In the flat plane of two dimensions  t...
Thursday, October 23, 2014

ABC of statistics

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     Songwriter Larry Lesser is a co-organizer (with Gizem Karaali ) of a poetry-with-mathematics reading at the Joint Mathematics Meeting...
Monday, October 20, 2014

Martin Gardner collected poems

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     Last week the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) had a special program honoring Martin Gardner (1914-2010); tomorrow (October 21...
2 comments:
Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Poetry Reading 1-11-15 at JMM in San Antonio

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You are invited to a poetry reading  sponsored by the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics at the 2015 Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM) ...
Friday, October 10, 2014

Taken out of context . . .

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Sometimes good lines fit so well into their poems that their individual merits go unrecognized.  And then, taken out of context, they can le...
Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Love Physics

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It turns out that one of the disadvantages of a long-term blog with lots of worthy material is that sometimes I lose track of fine work that...
Saturday, October 4, 2014

Can poetry change the climate for frogs?

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      Poems affect our spirits as well as our minds. And Split This Rock is looking for poems that protest and witness, world-changing poem...
Sunday, September 28, 2014

Journal of Math in the Arts features Poetry

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A special issue of the Journal of Mathematics and the Arts entitled "Poetry and Mathematics" is now available online at this link...
Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Clearing the Air with a Poem

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     Every poem has a climate -- a collection of emotional tones that overlay and underlay its words. Today -- as the U.N. meets in NY to di...
Saturday, September 20, 2014

Marching for Climate

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     Today I want to call attention to the growing global concern about climate change accentuated by the United Nations Climate Summit that...
Monday, September 15, 2014

Remembering Lee Lorch

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      Lee Lorch was a mathematician known for his social activism on behalf of black Americans as well as for his mathematics. He died in ...
Thursday, September 11, 2014

Hailstone numbers shape a poem

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     One of my favorite mathy poets is Halifax mathematician Robert Dawson -- his work is complex and inventive, and fun to puzzle over.  D...
Sunday, September 7, 2014

Hypertext poetry

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     We computer-screen readers all know hypertext; when we read along in Wikipedia or some other online document and come across an underl...
Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Mathy poems via e-mail

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Publishing a blog about poetry and mathematics brings me new connections -- it is not unusual for a day to begin with an email from another ...
Saturday, August 30, 2014

Mathy Poetry from Bridges 2014

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     This year's math-arts conference, Bridges 2014 , was in Korea.  And a dozen of us who write poetry-with-mathematics -- unable to at...
Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Grandma Got STEM

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     It was my good fortune last weekend to meet the sister-in-law of one of my neighbors, mathematician and Harvey Mudd professor, Rachel L...
Saturday, August 23, 2014

Changing colors, counting syllables

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Changing Colors by JoAnne Growney Blue yoyo -- awkwardly stopping-starting, rising-plummeting, seeking self-control. Ple...
Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Poetry in Math Journals

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         The Mathematical Intelligencer (publisher of the poem by Gizem Karaali given below) and the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics...
Friday, August 15, 2014

My best dream is floating . . .

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     Today I want to urge you to visit several sites in addition to my blog.  For example, there is the recent announcement of 2014 Fields M...
1 comment:
Monday, August 11, 2014

Narrated by a mathematician

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Recently translated by Adam Morris, the novel With My Dog-Eyes (Melville House, 2014) by Brazilian writer Hilda Hilst (1930-2004) is narrat...
Friday, August 8, 2014

Squaring the Circle

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Reminding us of the ancient unsolvable problem that so many attempted, the July/August 2014 issue of Poetry Magazine contains "Squari...
Wednesday, August 6, 2014

Divided selves, some of them savvy

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     For social connections, it is desirable not to be pegged as a member of an outcast group.  And thus a mathematician is likely to have a...
Sunday, August 3, 2014

A math prof's lament

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The mathematical connection for this poem is the fact that it was inspired by regrets for a missed opportunity in a mathematics class -- an ...
Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Fixing something wrong

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          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 . . .

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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

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     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 . . .

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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

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     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

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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 . . .

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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

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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

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     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

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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 . . .

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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?

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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

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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

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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

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     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 . . .

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     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

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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

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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

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     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

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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?

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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

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     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

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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

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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

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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"

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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

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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!)

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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

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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

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     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

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