Monday, December 30, 2019

Poetry made visual with math terms

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     As the year ends I have been revisiting books not seen for a while -- and one of them is Concert for Violin and Loneliness  (Criteri...
Friday, December 27, 2019

Math-poetry in support of immigrants

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     Winner of the Ted Hughes poetry award , British poet Hollie McNish has been in the news recently as she has been commissioned to write...
Monday, December 23, 2019

Counted syllables --> holiday wishes . . .

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 *   My   wish for   you is peace   and happiness   and whatever else   will count for you.  THANK YOU   for  all  you  share...
Thursday, December 19, 2019

Where are you from?

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A question often asked when meeting someone new is "Where are you from?" -- one of my neighbors, who was born in India and now liv...
2 comments:
Monday, December 16, 2019

Writing to Learn -- try Haiku

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     Some of us learn a concept best when we write about it -- taking notes in class or while reading OR simply exploring our mind's tho...
Friday, December 13, 2019

Using mathematics in the Pursuit of Happiness

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     One of my favorite blogs to visit is  Maria Popova's Brain Pickings   -- occasionally Popova's posts  link mathematics and poet...
Monday, December 9, 2019

Qatar teacher uses Arabic poetry to teach math

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     Today I call your attention to an inspiring story -- Mohamed al-Janahi is an engineer-turned-elementary-school-math-teacher who uses Ar...
Thursday, December 5, 2019

Reaching for the stars . . . with science and poetry

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     Astronomer Beatrice Muriel Hill Tinsley (1941– 1981) made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the evolution of galaxies ...
Monday, December 2, 2019

Dogs Know . . . Mathematics

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     A mathematics/statistics education researcher who writes both poetry and song lyrics -- who writes these often and well -- is Lawrence ...
Wednesday, November 27, 2019

I am THANKFUL for . . . mathematics, poetry . . .

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Today as I am preparing for Thanksgiving -- with its guests and travel and remembering -- my thoughts have turned back to Carl Sandburg (18...
Monday, November 25, 2019

The Poet of Number -- syllables counted by primes

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     Margaret Zheng is a first-year student at Haverford College -- with interests that include mathematics ( see page 2 at this link ) and ...
Monday, November 18, 2019

Multiplication is vexation ... the rule of three, etc.

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     There are lots of childhood rhymes that celebrate the use of numbers -- here is a sample ( found at this website )  -- the "Rule o...
Thursday, November 14, 2019

Connecting mathematics to a larger world . . .

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     I begin with words from a former student -- a postal worker who had retired early and went back to school to become a primary-school te...
Monday, November 11, 2019

Mathematics -- something useful ... or beautiful ...

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     I offer a sample below from a poem by Jane Hirshfield entitled "Mathematics" and invite you to go here to read the entire poe...
3 comments:
Wednesday, November 6, 2019

Try it -- you'll like it -- write an ACROSTIC poem!

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     When solving problems in mathematics, the constraints that are imposed on the solution often are helpful in solving it. As a simple exa...
Monday, November 4, 2019

Weaving mathematics into poetry . . .

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      José Alan Esparza Lozano  is from the border region of Ciudad Juárez, México and El Paso, Texas -- and traveled to Cambridge, Massachu...
Thursday, October 31, 2019

Math-Poetry at JMM in Denver --January 2020

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Deadline, November 12 -- Math-Poetry Contest for Colorado students More details here in this blog-posting  and  here at the American Ma...
Wednesday, October 30, 2019

Celebrate Halloween with counting rhymes . . .

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Halloween, Halloween, strangest sights I've ever seen . . . Three Little Witches One little, two little, three little witches Fl...
Monday, October 28, 2019

A pleasing permutation of lines -- the Villanelle

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     A villanelle is a 19-line French verse form -- with lines divided into five three-line stanzas and a final quatrain -- a poem in which...
Wednesday, October 23, 2019

Playing with permutations of the nouns of a poem

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     Founded in 1960, OULIPO   (short for French: Ouvroir de littérature potentielle ) has been active in the exploration of the effects of...
Monday, October 21, 2019

Poems and Primes

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     Recently Press 53  offered a "Prime 53 Poem" poetry challenge -- to write a poem meeting these conditions:      ·      Tota...
Wednesday, October 16, 2019

Small and large -- poetic views . . .

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     A favorite on my bookshelves is The Book of Disquiet: the Complete Edition by Fernando Pessoa *.  Here is a math-poetic item from thi...
2 comments:
Monday, October 14, 2019

Using poetry to open dialogues with science . . .

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     Recently I have obtained a copy of Sam Illingworth's book, A Sonnet to Science:  scientists and their poetry (Manchester Universit...
Wednesday, October 9, 2019

Math modeling is poetry . . .

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      Jennifer Pazour is a professor the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at  Rensselaer Polytecnic Institute and is, like...
Monday, October 7, 2019

The Cube of the Rainbow

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     Later this week a scheduled screening ( in nearby Takoma Park, MD ) of a film about Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) has prompted me to ret...
Wednesday, October 2, 2019

"My number is . . ."

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    More than twenty years ago I found and admired  Montana poet Sandra Alcosser 's poem, "My Number" (included in Except by N...
Monday, September 30, 2019

Personalities in Mathematics . . .

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     For those of us who spend time in the World of Mathematics, numbers and other mathematical objects often develop personalities.    Prev...
Monday, September 23, 2019

Articles that link math and poetry . . .

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Below I offer links to two articles that I rediscovered recently.       The first is a National Geographic Education Blog posting from 20...
Thursday, September 19, 2019

Sing a Song of Mathematics . . .

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     One of the long-term supporters of links between mathematics and the arts is Douglas Norton -- a mathematics professor at Villanova Uni...
Monday, September 16, 2019

Beautiful algebra -- a Haiku

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     One of my recent discoveries has been the POEM GENERATOR website at  https://www.poem-generator.org.uk/ .  In particular, I have used i...
Friday, September 13, 2019

"Creation Myth on a Moebius Band"

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Found at this site , several MINIMS -- brief,thought-provoking poems by Howard Nemerov (1920-1991).  This one deftly uses the mathematical ...
5 comments:
Wednesday, September 11, 2019

Colorado Math-Poetry Contest -- deadline 11-12-19

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 CONSIDER THIS !  The American Mathematical Society is sponsoring   a   math-poetry contest     for middle school, high school, and...
Monday, September 9, 2019

Is TWO more than ONE?

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     A poetry friend reminded me recently via email of the poetry of Shel Silverstein  (1930-1999) -- both humorous and provocative.  The em...
Wednesday, September 4, 2019

Poems of Mathematics -- recalling some old posts

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     Today I have been browsing some old posts, and offer below a few links to remind us of mathy poems posted in this blog more than five y...
Tuesday, September 3, 2019

Is this Fib true?

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     Is      it      true that      among folks      not anchored to math      by study or career choice, more      people show deli...
Thursday, August 29, 2019

Enrich Mathematics Classes with Poems

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    In my mathematics classrooms, I have found it a challenge to include the history and spirit of mathematics -- and its people -- along wi...
Wednesday, August 28, 2019

The personal becomes mathematical -- in poetry

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      Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)  used counting in her description of love in her sonnet that begins "How do I love thee? ...
Monday, August 26, 2019

Counting the Women . . .

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     Sometimes a professional group or a meeting-agenda or a table of contents contains so few women's names that they are easily counte...
2 comments:
Wednesday, August 14, 2019

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics--a TREASURE

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     Online and available FREE, the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics is a wonderful source of poems and stories and articles that connect ...
Monday, August 12, 2019

Celebrating Paul Erdos

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     One of the most interesting and productive mathematicians of all time was Paul Erdos (1913-1996).  He was author of more than 1416 pape...
Wednesday, August 7, 2019

Poetry and Science

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     Originally from Scotland,  Alice Major is a celebrated Canadian poet whose work often focuses on key ideas in mathematics and science....
Monday, August 5, 2019

A visual poem -- Decision tree

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From Norwegian math-poet Mike Naylor , this fascinating visual poem.  (Thanks, Mike -- from  JoAnne Growney  -- for permission to post.) ...
Wednesday, July 31, 2019

Recursion . . . in a life . . . in a poem . . .

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     The New Yorker offers a rich variety of poetry and in their print issue of 22 July 2019 they give a poem that I love:   "Sentence...
Monday, July 29, 2019

What is beauty? Is mathematics beautiful?

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     My thoughts have been turned to the beauty of mathematics by stumbling onto a very fine article, "Beauty Bare: The Sonnet Form, Ge...
Thursday, July 25, 2019

As in mathematics--a lot in a few words--in Haiku

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     Recently on a visit to the website Singapore Math I found dozens of "mathematical" Haiku -- and I offer several below.   Sti...
Monday, July 22, 2019

Mathematicians are not just white dudes . . .

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     Recently I found the wonderfully informative website arbitrarily close: musings on math and teaching -- my first visit to the site was...
Thursday, July 18, 2019

Math-Poetry -- Linz, Austria -- 07/19/2019

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     On Friday, July 19, 2-4 PM at the 2019 Bridges Math-Arts Conference in Linz, Austria will be a Reading of Mathematical Poetry that fe...