Friday, March 31, 2017

Math and poetry in film

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      One of my delights in the last year has been viewing films about poets and mathematicians.   First, " The Man Who Knew Infinity ...
Tuesday, March 28, 2017

Split this Rock, Freedom Plow Award, April 21

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     SPLIT THIS ROCK is a wonderful activist poetry organization -- based near to me in Washington, DC -- with a name based on a line by La...
Monday, March 27, 2017

Math-themed poems at Poets.org

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     The poetry website Poets.org is a wonderful source of thousands of poems.  During one recent visit to the site, I saw that they ha ve ...
Thursday, March 23, 2017

Remember Emmy Noether!

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     On today's date in 1882, mathematician Emmy Noether (1882-1935) was born.  Noether became fixed in my attention when, recently out...
Monday, March 20, 2017

Is unreasonableness ever reasonable?

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     This morning I have been thinking about these words of George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) that were part of the postings on the door of o...
Thursday, March 16, 2017

Julia . . . Set Aside Gender Roles . . .

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       For me there is a special pleasure in finding in my reading a word like "identity" or "prime" that has a special ...
Sunday, March 12, 2017

Again we celebrate Pi !

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 Now I give  -- I again enumerate π's digits, count out . . .  3.141592653 . . .  Tuesday, March 14, is Pi-day -- and I invite ...
Friday, March 10, 2017

Circle of Silence -- and sexual harassment

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       Colonel Stacey K. Vargas is a professor of Physics at the Virginia Military Institut e.  I found her poem -- with its vicious circles...
Wednesday, March 8, 2017

Honor Math-Women ...

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       The first math-woman that inspired me was Laura Church ; the first famous math-woman (someone with a theorem named after her ) whom ...
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Monday, March 6, 2017

The Geometry of Wood

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    A recent email from Todd Sformo, a biologist living in Barrow, Alaska, alerted me to his prose poem " Knots " in the online pu...
Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Zero is three!

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     February's second weekend was a busy one with the AWP Writer's conference in downtown Washington, DC -- and one of the special...
Thursday, February 23, 2017

The Geometry of Poetry

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     Some poems lie around for A LONG TIME waiting for me to pick them up.  Or I pick them up and put them down in a special place and then ...
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Tuesday, February 21, 2017

An old link but a GOOD one!

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     Today I have been working on some ideas for a paper for the 2017 BRIDGES Math-Arts Conference and I have needed to refer back to an ol...
Thursday, February 16, 2017

The Infinite

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     On page 53 of the February 6 issue of The New Yorker I recently found and enjoyed a poem entitled "The Infinite" by Charles S...
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Monday, February 13, 2017

Love and Mathematics -- and Valentine's Day

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     Perhaps you need a love poem for a mathematician, or about a mathematician -- you might enter the words love and mathematician in t...

Read it (math OR poem) more than once . ..

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     Recently my poet-friend, Millicent Borges Accardi , sent me a copy of her latest book, Only More So (Salmon Poetry, 2016).  She mentio...
Thursday, February 9, 2017

Like James Baldwin - refuse labels!

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     Last Sunday evening -- instead of watching Super Bowl LI -- in a crowded theater in downtown Silver Spring I watched the recently-relea...
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Monday, February 6, 2017

Celebrate Francis Su

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     In this morning's email I got a link (Thanks, Greg Coxson!) to this story that celebrates the talented mathematician and compassi...
Thursday, February 2, 2017

Groundhog Day 2017

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      My scan of this morning's Washington Post did not find a mention of today's important status as Groundhog Day -- and I am wor...
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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...
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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...