Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Life is Short

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     These recent days in the reign of the 45th US President have given new drama to the word survival .  Looking for wisdom I revis ited t...
2 comments:
Sunday, January 29, 2017

Girls can do EVERYTHING!

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     In a conversation years ago with one of my math colleagues at Bloomsburg University ,  each of us learned that the other had grown up o...
Thursday, January 26, 2017

Ultimately, all mathematics is poetry . . .

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     A popular vote on the truth of "all mathematics is poetry" might not lead to its affirmation. Because mathematics is a concis...
Monday, January 23, 2017

All Mathematicians are Equal!

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     Last Saturday's Women's March in Washington was one the great events of my lifetime -- the feeling of community that bonded us ...
Thursday, January 19, 2017

Dickens, from A Tale of Two Cities

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     Today I am facing tomorrow and the inauguration ceremony of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States.  With many uncerta...
Monday, January 16, 2017

Celebrate Martin Luther King

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     Today is our public celebration of the January 15 birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr (1929-1968) who was both preacher and poet in the...
Wednesday, January 11, 2017

Poems starring mathematicians

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      One of the challenges posed by a multi-year blog is locating interesting old posts.  One of  my frequent early topics was "poems ...
Friday, January 6, 2017

2017 is prime!

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     For her December 31 posting in Roots of Unity ( Scientific American blog ) mathematician Evelyn Lamb wrote about favorite primes --...
Tuesday, January 3, 2017

December 2016 (and prior) -- titles, dates of posts

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Here are the titles and dates of previous blog postings, moving backward from the present. For mathy poem s related to a particular mat...
Saturday, December 31, 2016

Happy New Year! -- Resolve to REWARD WOMEN!

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     My December 27 post celebrated the life of Vera Rubin (b 1928) who died on Christmas Day -- and a more recent Washington Post article...
Tuesday, December 27, 2016

Celebrate Vera Rubin -- a WOMAN of science!

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     This morning's Washington Post carried an obituary of Vera Rubin ( 1928-2016),  a pioneering astronomer who confirmed the existenc...
Monday, December 26, 2016

Post-Christmas reflections from W. H. Auden

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     A favorite writer whose works I enjoy again and again is English poet Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973). Here is a mathy excerpt from a ver...
Monday, December 19, 2016

Numbers for Christmas . . .

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* o n t o p g i v e l i g h t f r e e l y f o r e v e r a b u n d a n t b r i l l i a n t e v e r y w h e r e LOVE MATH! Christmas ...
Thursday, December 15, 2016

Remembering Thomas Schelling (1921-2016)

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     On December 13, Nobel-prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling (b 1921) died .  I had the privilege of meeting this outstanding scholar...
Monday, December 12, 2016

When one isn't enough ... words from a Cuban poet

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     Last week I traveled (as part of an organized people-to-people program) to Cuba.  I will need many days to sort and digest and organize...
Monday, November 28, 2016

Celebrate MATH-POETRY at JMM (1-5-17) in Atlanta

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     Repeating what has become an annual tradition, the Joint Mathematics Meetings of 2017 in Atlanta will include a poetry reading.  Thu...
Friday, November 25, 2016

Number-rhymes from Muriel Spark

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     A dozen years ago I visited Edinburgh and there became acquainted with the poetry of Scottish writer Muriel Spark (1918-2006)  -- prior...
Monday, November 21, 2016

An immeasurable continuum

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This poem by Emily Warn (a founder of PoetryFoundation.org ) uses mathematical terminology to introduce us to the immeasurable horror of de...
1 comment:
Friday, November 18, 2016

A well-constructed language

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     California math teacher, poet and editor, Carol Dorf is a vital force in the production and dissemination of mathy poems.  A blog SEARC...
Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Poetry and Protest

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      One of the fine new anthologies of 2016 is Of Poetry and Protest:  From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin , published by W W Norton -- pu...
Wednesday, November 9, 2016

So much depends on . . . normality

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<<   >>      I found an lovely little autumn poem ( after William Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow" ) by Mi...
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Monday, November 7, 2016

Happy Birthday, Marie Curie

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Today, November 7, is the birthday of Marie Curie (1867-1934, Nobel pri ze in physi cs, 1903 ).  Curie is celebrated in this poem by Richar...
Thursday, November 3, 2016

Calculating costs of pollution ... and other news

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     Recently I was browsing through an oldish collection, The Best American Poetry 1999 (edited by Robert Bly ) where I found and liked th...
Monday, October 24, 2016

Geometry -- in art and poetry

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     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

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     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"

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 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"

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     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

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     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)

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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

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     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

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     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 . . .

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     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!

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

A rumor (in verse) about Alfred Nobel

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 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 . . .

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     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

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    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

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     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

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     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

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      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)

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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...