Tuesday, July 25, 2017

from "The Half-Finished Heaven"

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     In 2011, Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer (1931-2015) won the Nobel Prize and this year Graywolf Press has issued a wonderful collection...
Monday, July 17, 2017

A CENTO from BRIDGES 2017 Poets

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     A cento is a literary work made from quotations from other works -- most often it is a poem, assembled from lines by other poets.    Be...
2 comments:
Sunday, July 16, 2017

Too soon -- Maryam Mirzakhani taken by cancer

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     The brilliant and celebrated mathematician -- and 2014 Fields Medal Winner -- Maryam Mirzakhani has, on July 14 at age 40, died after ...
Wednesday, July 12, 2017

They Say She Was Good -- for a Woman

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      Regulars to this blog know of my appreciation and support for the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics -- an online journal that publish...
Sunday, July 9, 2017

Three Odd Words

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     I love the mental jolt I get when a math word is used with a non-math meaning -- suddenly some playful back-and-forth happens in my hea...
Wednesday, July 5, 2017

Finding poems in Maria Mitchell's words

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SO MANY words and phrases are poetic that are NOT YET called poems. A recent Facebook posting for the Max Planck Society featured th...
Thursday, June 29, 2017

The NUMBERS that help us REMEMBER . . .

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     Born in Lithuania, poet Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004) became fluent in Polish, Lithuanian, Russian, English and French.  He emigrated to ...
Tuesday, June 27, 2017

Chains of Reasoning

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     In a recent conversation about mathematics, one of us said, "Mathematics is not about what is true, or cannot be, but is a collect...
Thursday, June 22, 2017

Euclid's Iron Hand

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      Alice Major is a Canadian poet who admits to having loved mathematics since girlhood and who often includes mathematical ideas and im...
Tuesday, June 20, 2017

Three Plus Four Divided by Seven

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     A good friend, Doru Radu -- with whom I have partnered to translate some Romanian poetry into English -- shares with me a love for the ...
Friday, June 16, 2017

Fondness for numbers . . .

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     Today I am looking back to a posting on 23 April 2011 that includes the first stanza of one of my favorite mathy poems; here is a copy...
Wednesday, June 14, 2017

Equation after equation, smiling . . .

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       Today's news offers the exciting announcement that Tracy K. Smith is the new Poet Laureate of the United States.  I have not fo...
Monday, June 12, 2017

Finding the Normal Curve

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     A poem I have much admired since I first saw it (January, 2016) in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics is "Pension Building, Wa...
Thursday, June 8, 2017

The treasures of memory . . .

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                  The Days of the Month      Thirty days hath September,      April, June, and November;      February has twenty-eight ...
Monday, June 5, 2017

Celebrate mathematics -- and the other liberal arts!

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     Before it became linked to science and engineering and computing, mathematics was one of the liberal arts.  And, in my view, it should ...
Wednesday, May 31, 2017

Kandinsky's geometry inspires poetry . . .

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     Found at the vast and varied international poetry site,  Poetry International Web , a mathy poem by Australian poet Katherine Gallagher...
Thursday, May 25, 2017

A poem with 90 lines, 269 words . . .

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     A poet whose work I enjoy is  Charles Bernstein   (editor at the electronic poetry center ,  a vast and wonderful site to visit and bro...
Monday, May 22, 2017

My Math Teacher

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     The 2016-2017 school year is drawing to a close.  Some are loving their math teachers and some are celebrating them with poetry.  Here ...
1 comment:
Thursday, May 18, 2017

"Mathematics" & "Poetry" in the same sentence!

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Thanks to Google for helping me find things -- for example, this quote from Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun  :      Poetry is a form of ...
2 comments:
Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Solve for X . . . and understand . . .

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     In this morning's email, today's Poem-a-Day  from poets.org  has the mathy title, " Solve for X ." Written by Oliver ...
Monday, May 15, 2017

Links to poems and songs with STEM themes

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     During April 2017, Indiana State Poet Laureate Shari Wagner teamed with Indiana Humanities to feature the work of Hoosier poets to cel...
Thursday, May 11, 2017

Using SONGS to teach STEM -- online conference

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     A recent email from Greg Crowther has let me know of an upcoming conference that looks to be LOTS OF FUN -- an interdisciplinary vir...
2 comments:
Tuesday, May 9, 2017

Save the Climate, change STEM to STEAM

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     Australian poet Erica Jolly is one of the leaders of the STEM to STEAM movement in Australia -- she has introduced me to The Conversati...
Wednesday, May 3, 2017

Speaking out for Immigrants, McNish

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        British spoken-word poet Hollie McNish has shouted out in verse in support of  immigration .  Her poem, from which I include some li...
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...
1 comment:
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 ...
1 comment:
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...