Friday, April 28, 2017

March for Climate -- again!

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        The lines below are copied from a posting made on September 20, 2014 -- posted as I finalized plans to travel to New York City for a...
Wednesday, April 26, 2017

Math-Arts Journal -- Free Access

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     Sometimes an email contains a wonderful gift -- such was the case recently when I got a message from the Journal of Mathematics and the...
Monday, April 24, 2017

Poetry and Science -- Allies in Discovery

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     Poet Jane Hirshfield read onstage as part of the March for Science in Washington, DC on Saturday April 22.   Science and poetry both a...
Thursday, April 20, 2017

Remembering Karl Patten

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     From my Lewisburg, PA friend, Ruta Karelis, I have recently learned of the April 16  death of my beloved first poetry teacher, Bucknell...
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Tuesday, April 18, 2017

Poetry by Victorian Scientists

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     Thanks to Greg Coxson who has recently alerted me to this 2011 article by Paul Collins in New Scientist , "Rhyme and reason: The V...
Friday, April 14, 2017

A Fib for Easter

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     Recently a reader commented privately to me that she did not like the Fib as a poem-style since it seems to allow almost any prose stat...
Tuesday, April 11, 2017

Mathematics and Poetry are . . .

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     This week between Palm Sunday and Easter is a school vacation week for six of my grandchildren -- Carly and Emma, Shaya and Daniel, Ser...
Thursday, April 6, 2017

Prime -- with rhythm and rhyme

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     Earlier this year, an email from James D. Herren let me know about his recent e-book, Wit and Wonder, Poetry with Rhythm and Rhyme -- ...
2 comments:
Monday, April 3, 2017

Math-Stat Awareness Month -- find a poem!

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APRIL is Mathematics and Statistic s Awareness Month AND National Poetry Month !   Celebrate with a MATHY POEM, found here in this blo...
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 ...