Monday, October 24, 2016

Geometry -- in art and poetry

›
     St. Louis poet Constance Levy is an acclaimed author of children's poetry -- I found her poem "Madinat as Salam" (includ...
Wednesday, October 19, 2016

Make Something of Nothing ... with Bob Dylan

›
     The puzzle of nothing actually being something is central to our use of numbers -- and I use it today as an excuse to link to a Bob D...
Saturday, October 15, 2016

Have a Happy "Hamilton Day"

›
 April 15-23, 2016 is Maths Week in Ireland .        AND, as this recent Slate article by Katharine Merow announces, in Ireland Octobe...
Friday, October 14, 2016

From order to chaos -- "Fig Tree Rag"

›
     Robert Dawson , a mathematician and poet from Halifax, Nova Scotia, is wide-ranging in the mathematics that he includes in poetry.  He...
Tuesday, October 11, 2016

She argued for Newton's physics

›
     Here, by Voltaire , is a poem about mathematician/scientist Émilie du Châtelet (1706-1749) -- who explained Newton's physics but w...
Thursday, October 6, 2016

Be astonished -- National Poetry Day (British)

›
Today I celebrate British partnership with Romanian poetry!      One of the internet treasures I have found is to Contemporary Literature ...
Tuesday, October 4, 2016

Generating a sonnet -- human vs computer

›
     News last month from UC Berkeley's School of Information described a computer that writes poetry. In particular, it writes sonnets...
1 comment:
Wednesday, September 28, 2016

A Nest of Worlds -- in verse by Margaret Cavendish

›
     Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673) was an English aristocrat, scientist, writer and philosopher .  The following interesting and charming ...
Monday, September 26, 2016

The Bloomsburg Fair -- with theorems and lies . . .

›
     Along the north branch of the Susquehanna River in east-central Pennsylvania lies the town of Bloomsburg -- known for Bloomsburg Univer...
Wednesday, September 21, 2016

Math-woman, be bold!

›
     During these days in which discrimination against math-women happens again and again I have wanted to write a poem that celebrates us ....
1 comment:
Monday, September 19, 2016

A rumor (in verse) about Alfred Nobel

›
 Before the poem a bit of history about its source of publication:      The Humanistic Mathematics Network Newsletter (HMNN) was founde...
1 comment:
Thursday, September 15, 2016

Keyboard characters make a poem . . .

›
     Here's poem found in an old email from my Bloomsburg friend, Janice B.  Its authors turn out to be Fred Bremmer and Steve Kroese ...
Tuesday, September 13, 2016

A Fib (a perfect circle) -- and some math-po links

›
    1      Not      1      one      2      circle     3      is perfect     5      yet the idea     8      of circle's useful ever...
Friday, September 9, 2016

Division by Zero

›
     At Victoria University in Melbourne, novelist, playwright and poet Tom Petsinis also teaches mathematics.  He participated in the 2016...
Tuesday, September 6, 2016

A counting rhyme, a riddle

›
     During the summer I had lots of activities with grandchildren -- they all love to read and one of the books we enjoyed together was Cou...
Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Twelveness -- a Fibonacci poem from G4G

›
      Science writer, philosopher, and skeptic Martin Gardner (1914-2010) is perhaps best known for his long-running Scientific American c...
1 comment:
Monday, August 29, 2016

Math-play via verse (with George Darley)

›
A recent email from Colm Mulcahy -- who seeks out all things Irish -- alerted me to Dublin poet and math-text author, George Darley (1795-1...
Thursday, August 25, 2016

Numbers and Faces - poem, anthology

›
  "Numbers and Faces" is the title of a poem by W. H. Auden that ends with these lines :             True, between faces almost ...
Monday, August 22, 2016

Math-poetry connects with Carol Burnett

›
     When I began teaching mathematics my students compared me -- to my delight -- with Carol Burnett .  Recent thoughts of this amazing com...
Wednesday, August 17, 2016

Swim, Girl, Swim -- thirty-five miles

›
     Today's poem uses a single number ( 35 ) as it celebrates Gertrude Ederle (1905-2003), an Olympic (1924) swimmer and (in 1926) Eng...
Monday, August 15, 2016

Find math-poetry links in BRIDGES archives

›
     As noted in last week's posts, the annual international math-arts festival, BRIDGES, recently was held in Finland.  Now the archive...
Thursday, August 11, 2016

More from BRIDGES poets . . .

›
     The 2016 BRIDGES Math-Arts Conference is currently taking place at the University of Jyväskylä in Jyväskylä, Finland.  Poets on this...
1 comment:
Monday, August 8, 2016

Words -- and Meanings -- and BRIDGES, 2016

›
     Tomorrow the 2016 BRIDGES Conference (which celebrates the connections between mathematics and the arts) will open at the University o...
Thursday, August 4, 2016

POETRY -- in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

›
     Pomona College mathematician Gizem Karaali, one of the editors of the online Journal of Humanistic Mathematics , is also a poet .  And ...
Sunday, July 31, 2016

Loving the difference quotient ... and more ...

›
     From Philadelphia poet-mathematician, Marion Cohen , a new collection  -- Closer to Dying (Word Tech, 2016).  When I received the book...
Monday, July 25, 2016

Homage to Godel

›
From Erica Jolly , an Australian poet and online friend, I have learned of a fine anthology of science poems --  A Quark for Mister Mark:  1...
3 comments:
Thursday, July 21, 2016

One thing leads to another -- "Do the Math"

›
     I offer poetry workshops for Peer Wellness and Recovery Services -- and PWRS coordinator Miriam Yarmolinsky invited me to go with her ...
Tuesday, July 19, 2016

A number tells the story -- in these Haiku

›
     One of my neighbors, Carol, has been cleaning out bookshelves and offered me her old copy of Gary Snyder's collection,  The Back Co...
2 comments:
Monday, July 18, 2016

String Theory

›
     String Theory is a theoretical framework that attempts to explain, among other things, quantum gravity.  Its basic elements are open a...
Tuesday, July 12, 2016

Continue to celebrate Szymborska

›
If you are a frequent visitor to this blog, you know that Polish Nobelist (1996) Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012) is one of my favorite poets...
Thursday, July 7, 2016

Remembering Reza Sarhangi

›
     In 1998 at Southwestern College in Winfield, KS an Iranian mathematician, Reza Sarhangi , organized the first of a series of annual Bri...
1 comment:
Tuesday, July 5, 2016

What Math Teachers Do

›
     They ignore me.  I      raise my hand -- wave it      to ask questions, to      offer answers -- but      they call on the boys. ...
Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Revolutions and singularities

›
     Early in June it was my privilege to hear poet Lesley Wheeler read as part of the Joaquin Miller Poetry Series on summer Sundays in W...
Sunday, June 26, 2016

Important online sources for mathy poems

›
Every issue of the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics contains poetry. The Spring 2016 issue of TalkingWriting has more than a score of ...
Friday, June 24, 2016

Exponential power

›
From this week's New Yorker (June 27, 2016) from a poem by Maya Ribault entitled "Society of Butterflies" this mat hy statem...
Thursday, June 23, 2016

A sonnet with numbers

›
     Sonnet: Now I see them     by Michael Palmer           Now I see them sitting me before a mirror.           There’s noise and laught...
Monday, June 20, 2016

Wanting things proportional . . .

›
Here is a reflective poem by San Diego poet Ben Doller (found also at Poets.org and included here with permission of the poet).        P...
Thursday, June 16, 2016

Women occupy mathematics

›
     Poems thrive on imagery created from specific (rather than vague) details -- and numbers and other math terms are very specific!  Below...
2 comments:
Monday, June 13, 2016

When parallel lines meet, that is LOVE

›
Bernadette Turner teaches mathematics at Lincoln University in Missouri. And, via a long-ago email (lost for a while, and then found) she h...
Thursday, June 9, 2016

Symbols shape our thoughts

›
     In mathematics -- as in spoken languages -- we have learned to use symbols to shape our thoughts.  Pioneering artist Marcel Duchamp (1...
Monday, June 6, 2016

A poem, a contradiction . . .

›
     One stra tegy for proving a mathemat ical theorem is a " proof by contradiction ."  In such a proof one begins by supposing t...
Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Aesop's fables in verse ... the price of greed ...

›
     The farmhouse* in which I grew up had a room we called "The Library" because of its small bookshelf with my father's book...
Thursday, May 26, 2016

Mathy poems OUT LOUD

›
     Here is a link to "Applied Mathematics" written and recited by London poet Dan Simpson .   This link leads to several math-a...