Wednesday, September 29, 2021

Opposites -- in Life as in Mathematics

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        Recently on NPR I heard an engaging interview with poet Kevin Young about his new collection Stones -- about memory and loss, and ...
Monday, September 27, 2021

Geometry of a Neighborhood

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      As we walk around, our views of our surroundings change;  lines that look parallel from one view appear to be converging from another ...
Wednesday, September 22, 2021

It all starts with counting . . .

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     Sometimes our focus on what is important -- in life, in love  . . . as in mathematics --  starts with counting.   This process is artfu...
Monday, September 20, 2021

More of Yeats and Geometry

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      A blog-posting I made last week spoke of the use by poet William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) of geometry in his poetry .  Here is anothe...
Wednesday, September 15, 2021

Intersecting lines of math, the arts, and justice

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       A multimedia interdisciplinary project linking mathematics, the arts, and language -- and entitled  Rhythm of Structure -- w...
Monday, September 13, 2021

Yeats and Geometry

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      Spelman College Professor Emeritus Colm Mulcahy is a mathematician and scholar whose talents and interests reach far and wide.  An em...
Wednesday, September 8, 2021

Seeing Mathematics Everywhere

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     Ohio poet Cathryn Essinger has a twin brother who is a mathematician -- and links to mathematics sometimes appear in her poetry.   Her...
Monday, September 6, 2021

The math of everyday life . . .

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     Back in the 90's when I participated in several poetry workshops at Pennsylvania's Bucknell University, one of my fellow-studen...
Tuesday, August 31, 2021

There is more than one way to die . . .

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      In the 1970's I had access to birth control and was fortunate to be able to be involved with adoption of children rather than abo...
Monday, August 30, 2021

Mathematics and Poetry -- Arts of the Heart

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      On the opening pages of a Springer Reference, Handbook of the Mathematics of the Arts and Sciences , we find a list of 107 fascinating...
Wednesday, August 25, 2021

Using "mathematics" in a poem

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     One of my daily emails is poem-a-day from poets.org -- and yesterday's poem surprised me with the word "mathematics" app...
Monday, August 23, 2021

Opposites Attract

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     Poems by visual poet Karl Kempton are always fascinating and often mathy.  Here, from Kempton's collection, poems about something a...
Wednesday, August 18, 2021

Shaping Poems with Numbers

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      Numerical patterns can help guide our minds and fingers to create poems -- and one of the patterns I like is the Fibonacci numbers -- ...
Monday, August 16, 2021

BRIDGES -- connecting math and poetry

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     The BRIDGES Math-Arts organization held its 2021 conference (early in August) online  -- and, although many of the meetings were avail...
Friday, August 13, 2021

JHM -- a rich source of mathy poems

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      Every six months the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics offers a new online issue and includes a generous offering of mathy poems.  He...
Monday, August 9, 2021

Once upon a time, 350 was our goal

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     Back in 2007, 350 parts per million was the "safe upper limit" for CO 2 in our atmosphere -- a figure  presented by NASA sci...
Tuesday, August 3, 2021

Poetry with Numbers -- from Lewis Carroll

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     One of the timeless treasures on my bookshelves is a complete collection of work by Lewis Carroll (pen name for Charles Lutwidge Dodg...
Saturday, July 31, 2021

Favorite -- most visited -- Posts

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Because this blog has more than a thousand posts, spread over more than eleven years of posting, finding best information can be challenging...
Friday, July 23, 2021

Excitement from Finding a Proof . . . and then . . .

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Recently I have been revisiting the poems that Sarah Glaz and I collected for the anthology, Strange Attractors:  Poems of Love and Mathemat...
Wednesday, July 21, 2021

Love and Tensor Algebra

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     Stanislaw Lem (1921-2006) was a Polish science fiction writer whose works have been widely translated.  Here is a poem of his (found h...
Monday, July 19, 2021

Distance Melts . . . between math and poetry . . .

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      One of my early math-poetry connections was with applied mathematician John Lew (1934-2006) who contributed often to the Humanistic ...
Wednesday, July 14, 2021

Mathematics Humor -- in rhyming verse . . .

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      At the website KOMPLEXIFY! a mathematician named Travis celebrates his love of mathematics in various ways, including humor and verse...
1 comment:
Monday, July 12, 2021

Limericks about Graphs -- Prize-Winners

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     A couple of weeks ago I posted information about prize-winning poetry in the Writing portion of the 2021 MoMath Steven Strogatz Contes...
Wednesday, July 7, 2021

Picture a Mathematician . . . describe HER . . .

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     Mathematicians are not always white and nerdy and male . . . but, for the others who dare to specialize in science and mathematics, the...
Tuesday, July 6, 2021

Numbers keep track of memories . . .

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     Sometimes the specific nature of counting can help us, for a bit of time, to steer our thoughts for away from sadness.  Here is a poem ...
Thursday, July 1, 2021

Looking back . . . to previous posts . . .

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  BROWSE and ENJOY! Back in January 2020 I gathered a list of titles of previous posts and posted it here at this link .  And below I offer...
Monday, June 28, 2021

Math Communication with Poetry -- Strogatz Prize

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Recently I have learned -- through Mo-Math ( National Museum of Mathematics ) -- of the of the Steven H. Strogatz Prize -- recognizing hig...
Friday, June 25, 2021

One More Love Poem

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     Expressing love with mathematical terminology is beautifully done in "One More Love Poem" by  Dunya Mikhail   -- this poem wa...
Tuesday, June 22, 2021

Interpreting Khayyam -- in Rhyme

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     Eleventh century Persian scholar Omar Khayyam (1048-1131) is described by Wikipedia as a polymath -- he was a mathematician, astronome...
Monday, June 21, 2021

Putting CALCULUS into a poem . . .

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 Can our world be described using calculus?      The poem-a-day offering this morning (6/21/21) from poets.org gives me new ideas about de...
1 comment:
Thursday, June 17, 2021

Images of a Complex World

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     One of the treasures on my bookshelf is Images of a Complex World: The Art and Poetry of Chaos by University of Wisconsin poet Robin C...
Monday, June 14, 2021

Encryption and Love

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One of my recent book-acquisitions is The Woman who Smashed Codes by Jason Fagone  -- a story of Elizebeth Smith Friedman who transitioned ...
Thursday, June 10, 2021

Every Seventeen Years . . .

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Millions of Brood X 17-year cicadas have recently emerged in the Washington, DC area and they are the subjects of laughter, fear, recipes, a...
Tuesday, June 8, 2021

A Life Made to Count

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     The title of this blog-post is part of a headline from The Washington Post -- a headline for a review by GW Professor Lisa Page   of a...
1 comment:
Friday, June 4, 2021

A Few Lines of Parody

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      Recently I re-found -- in my copy of The Mathematical Magpie by Clifton Fadiman (1904-1999)  (Simon and Schuster, 1962) -- these li...
Tuesday, June 1, 2021

Euclid and Barbie -- and attitudes toward math . . .

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     Teacher-poet-musician Glen Brown has shared with me his mathy poem that has for its epigraph a controversial line once spoken (back in...
Saturday, May 29, 2021

A Mathy Rhyme from Twitter

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When I have a bit of extra time, it is fun for me to visit Twitter (my postings may be found as JoAnne Growney @MathyPoems ) and to find i...
Wednesday, May 26, 2021

A Rhymer and an Analyst -- a Friendship

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     Several recent emails have turned my attention again to Irish mathematician (?and poet?) William Rowan Hamilton (1805-1865).  Availabl...
2 comments:
Monday, May 24, 2021

What does CANCEL mean? -- some poetic wordplay!

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      Lawrence "Larry" Lesser is a professor in the Mathematical Sciences Department at the University of Texas in El Paso and a ...
1 comment:
Friday, May 21, 2021

MoMath Celebrates Limericks!

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     New York's Museum of Mathematics celebrated National Limerick Day on May 12 with an online program of contributors reading their m...
Wednesday, May 19, 2021

Reflecting on Pi . . .

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     A few months ago I got an email from  Adaobi Chiemelu , a Nigerian poet and spoken word artist who studied  studied mathematics at th...
Monday, May 17, 2021

Keeping Track of Chairs

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 The first steps in mathematics . . . COUNTING!       I grew up on a farm and keeping track by counting happened often -- counting chickens,...
Thursday, May 13, 2021

Mathematical Forms in Poetry . . .

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      During recent days, one of my special enjoyments has been finding time to read Marian Christie's blog -- a delightful collection o...
Monday, May 10, 2021

Mathy Jokes

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      In a recent search for funny mathy poems I have discovered the collection by G. Patrick Vennebush pictured below as well as a sequel ...
Thursday, May 6, 2021

Climate Concerns

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      Ideas become internalized when we WRITE about them -- and I encourage students AND all of us to write about climate change and efforts...
Monday, May 3, 2021

Celebrate Math-Women -- Celebrate AWM

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1    This 2    year's the 3    fiftieth 4    birthday of the 5    Association 6    for Women in Mathe- 7    matics.  Join celebrations -...
Friday, April 30, 2021

Polyform Puzzles -- presented in verse

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     Many math-loving folks gather periodically at meetings called  G4G (Gatherings for Gardner) to celebrate the life and contributions o...
1 comment:
Wednesday, April 28, 2021

A Visit to Mathland -- where Reason rules!

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Published in 1979 by PRIMARY PRESS, out of print -- try your library! Before purchasing this anthology (found at a math conference) I had ne...
Monday, April 26, 2021

Mean, Median, Mode -- and Poetry and Bananas!

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 A wonderful resource for mathy poems for students is  “ S.T.E.A.M. Powered Poetry Videos for Pk-8 ”  -- and I have recently connected there...