BRIDGES 2013 -- Math-Art in the Netherlands

Since 1998, Summer BRIDGES Conferences have been held -- enthusiastic gatherings where theater and visual art and music and poetry and mathematics engage participants in lively exchange.  This year's conference is July 27-31 in Enschede, the Netherlands, and mathematician-poet Sarah Glaz has organized an outstanding group of talented readers to share their poetry on Sunday, July 28.  Following the featured readers will be an open reading -- and interested readers are invited to email Glaz using the address found here. 
      One of  the scheduled readers on July 28 in Enschede is Scottish poet and statistician Eveline Pye; shown below is one of the poems she will read --  "Love of Algebra" : 

Haiku to Mars -- select and vote

     Each of us may now (July 15 - 29) vote for one of the thousands of Haiku submitted to NASA's "Haiku for Mars" contest. Three top vote-getters will be selected for transmission to our red planet. I invite you to vote (at this link) for my entry. My contest Haiku also is shown below; it follows a particular number scheme -- formed from one-syllable words with word-lengths following this pattern: 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1.

I go for Mars, start

dreams -- flights straight, stretched, streamed, whirled bright.

Round bold red am I.

THANKS for your vote. 

Counting on numbers

Alan Michael Parker's anthologized and highly regarded poem "Family Math" begins in the style of a typical word-problem from Algebra -- and continues with a weaving of the ways that numbers describe our lives.

Family Math     by Alan Michael Parker

I am more than half the age of my father,
who has lived more than twice as long
as his father, who died at thirty-six.

Pool -- a game of geometry?

     Years ago I taught  a "liberal arts mathematics" course -- and for a time we used the text  Mathematics, a Human Endeavor: A Textbook for Those Who Think They Don't Like the Subject by Harold R. Jacobs (W H Freeman, 1971);  the text's topics included one new to me, the geometry of the paths of billiard balls.  The ease I found with this mathematics ill-prepared me for the skill I needed to avoid embarrassment at a neighbor's new pool table -- and the memories of it all drew me immediately into Dan Brown's poem, "Why I Never Applied Myself to Pool," found in the March 2013 issue of Poetry.

       Why I Never Applied Myself to Pool      by Dan Brown

Grandma got STEM

     There are so many fine websites to visit and blogs to read that it is hard to get to them all. One of my recent pleasures has been Grandma Got STEM (STEM  = Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics), orchestrated by Rachel Levy, Harvey Mudd College, Mathematics.  Recent entries there that I've enjoyed are Martha Siegel (Towson University, Mathematics) and Carol Jo Crannell (mother of Annalisa Crannell, Franklin and Marshall College, Mathematics and Art).
     For a while I wondered how I might link these STEM pioneers to poetry and this morning was delighted to discover in a bio of poet Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge that her Chinese mother was a mathematician.  And these initial stanzas of Berssenbrugge's poem "Tan Tien" illustrate her familiarity with mathematical vocabulary.

Calculus (and calyculus)

For lots of years I have subscribed to A.Word.A.Day, founded by Anu Garg, and on 3 June 2013  -- offered in the category of "words that appear to be misspellings" -- the word that appeared in my email was calyculus (kuh-LIK-yuh-luhs), a noun designating a cup-shaped structure.  From this, of course, my thoughts turned to calculus and to poems on that subject.  Below I offer "UR-CALCULUS" by Jonathan Holden.  This Kansan poet has said that that his physicist father would write equations while sitting at the dining room table -- and "UR-CALCULUS" considers mathematics from a boy-riding-in-the-back-seat-of-a-car point of view.  

     UR-CALCULUS     by Jonathan Holden

               The child is the father of the man. 
                        -- W. W. Wordsworth

     Back then, "Calculus"
     was a scary college word,
     and yet we studied it
     from the back seat, we studied  
     the rates at which
     the roadside trees went striding 

Miroslav Holub -- "what use is it?"

     In earlier postings I have expressed my admiration for the Czech poet Miroslav Holub (1923-1998)  -- a research scientist who also wrote fine poetry.  In a biographical sketch of Holub at poetryfoundation.org, the poet is quoted as saying, " . . . I'm afraid that, if I had all the time in the world to write my poems, I would write nothing at all."   There is no agreed standard for the amount of time  to spend on a creative work.  Many poets devote their full time to their craft;  others fear over-writing and strictly limit their writing and editing.  In each aspect of our lives it is possible to do too much or too little thinking about things.  And so it goes.
      My post on 5 April 2013 linked to several math-related Holub poems.  And here is another; in "Magnetism," Holub focuses on the sometimes-silly, sometimes-practical, sometimes-too-limiting question often put to mathematics or science, "what use is it?"

Magnetism     by Miroslav Holub

17-word Haiku

     On 25 May 2013 this blog contained an announcement of NASA's Haiku-to-Mars contest.  The contest rules are here -- and July 1 is the deadline for submission.  Voting to select three favorite submissions will begin on July 15.  For my own submission I decided to use numerical constraints -- I limited my Haiku to one-syllable words and used an increasing-decreasing pattern of the lengths of words.  Here is an example (not the one I submitted, which begins "I go for Mars . . .").

A is the sign first
spread through thoughts –- stretched, breathed, squared, sighed.
Trace thru all to Z.

Symmetric squares

Sometimes we find meaning among disparate objects when they are juxtaposed. Here are nine words I have chosen because of the ways they are spelled. Using them to form two squares. Are my squares poems?

     S A F E
     A R E A
     F E A R
     E A R N

Why is SHE less known? . . .

Sometimes matching words to a syllable-count helps to bring focus to my musings.  Here are two stanzas for which I used the Fibonacci numbers as lengths for the lines I built as I considered the continuing invisibility of most math-women. (I have some hope that the second of these is primarily remembering -- and is not true of family child-care today.)

8-5-3-2-1-1    A FIB

HE is famous but SHE is not.
Yet we once judged her
potential
greater
than
his.