Girls who like math

Often I think about the interactions of girls with mathematics and recently I have been feeling delighted that all of my school-age granddaughters like math. In fact, Harvey Mudd mathematician Rachel Levy has included views from these girls (and from me) here in her blog, "Grandma Got STEM."

T h i s
g i r l
d o e s
m a t h

S u m
f o r
f u n
 

s o
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To read selections from several of my favorite poems about girls-in-math (including Sharon Olds' poem "The One Girl at the Boys' Party" and Kyoko Mori's poem, "Barbie Says Math is Hard") follow this link to a posting made on 10 June 2010.  Another math-girls post was back on  26 December 2010.  Or use the SEARCH box (upper right) to find poems related to your own choice of topics.

Probability and Coincidence

     On page 26 of my copy of the latest New Yorker is a poem by Lia Purpura entitled "Probability."  In her brief poem Purpura renders with poetic power the astonishment each of us feels when meeting a long-ago classmate at an out-of-town super market or some other unexpected event.  Take time to follow the link and read this poem.
     Recently several friends have shared with me their amazement at unexpected coincidences and I have been tempted to illustrate -- perhaps with the birthday paradox --  how likely to happen unexpected events may be.

  With more than 23 persons in a room the chances are more than 50-50

 that two of them will share a birthday (same day, maybe different years).

Many websites offer explanation of this "birthday paradox" -- here is one.

To add two and two

     Today I call attention again (as in my post for 6 January, 2015) to the extensive  Science-Poetry collection edited by Norman Hugh Redington and Karen Rae Keck. Mathy (rather than bawdy) limericks are featured in the collection; for example, this one by an unknown author:

       There was an old man who said, "Do
       Tell me how I'm to add two and two?
            I'm not very sure
            That it doesn't make four --
       But I fear that is almost too few."  

Opposites, Balance

     Recently, and perhaps always, opposites have interested me.  For example, the complementary and sometimes  conflicting nuggets of advice contained in "Pinch a penny, waste a pound" and "It is best to prepare for the days of necessity."   And in  "Kindness effects more than severity" and "Spare the rod, spoil the child."   Maybe what I like best is the challenge of synthesizing opposite truths.
     Mathematics contains many pairs of entities that are, each in some different sense, opposites:

2 and -2      2 and 1/2

horizontal and vertical   differentiation and integration

And there are some arbitrary subdivisions that often are treated as if they are disconnected opposites:

pure vs. applied (creating mathematics vs. solving problems)

teaching and learning, creating vs. teaching, arts and sciences

In an ideal world, opposites exist with "Balance" -- which is the title of the following lovely and contemplative poem by Adam Zagajewski :

The Geometry of Winter, with Eagles

A poetry-listening opportunity in the Washington, DC area:

Poet Martin Dickinson will read from his new collection, My Concept of Time, 
on Sunday, January 11 at Arlington's Iota Cafe. 

AND -- if you 're San Antonio on January 11, 2015 you'll want to attend  

the 5:30 PM poetry-with-math reading (details here) 

at the Gonzales Convention Center, sponsored by JHM.

 

From My Concept of Time, here's a poem of the geometry of our winter world.

          Fourteen Eagles, Winter     by Martin Dickinson
                                  for Phyllis

          We spot them, first almost imaginary
          thin pencil lines or scratches on our glasses.

          The earth's disk flattens out
          where this pale land becomes the bay, 

from MIT Science-Poetry -- The Cal-Dif-Fluk Saga

     Recently I have enjoyed browsing a voluminous online 19th century Science-Poetry collection (Watchers of the Moon) hosted by MIT, gathered and edited by Norman Hugh Redington and Karen Rae Keck. Google led me to the site in a search for " poetry of calculus" and I found there found a fascinating item by J. M. Child:  The Cal-Dif-Fluk Saga (from The Monist: A Quarterly Magazine Devoted to the Philosophy of Science -- Open Court Publishing, 1917) and described as "a  pseudo-epic about the invention of calculus."  
     Child was a translator (from Latin into English) of the works of Isaac Barrow and Gottfried Leibniz and his poem presents the names of well-known mathematicians in clever scrambles:  Isa-Tonu is Newton, Zin-Bli is Leibniz, Isa-Roba is Barrow, Gen-Tan-Agg stands for Barrow's Gen-eral method of Tan-gents and of Agg-regates while Shun-Fluk and Cal-Dof refer to the methods of Newton and Leibniz.  One may, with a fair amount of work, enjoy this dramatization of warriors and weapons -- battles that were part of the development of calculus.  Here from the middle of the Saga (from Section 6 (of 17)), is a sample of Child's lines illustrating the struggles that calculus required.

The Role of Zero

     In mathematics, as in poetry, multiple meanings are common and create power for the language.   For example, the number 0 is an idempotent element, an additive identity, a multiplicative annihilator -- and it also plays the role of something that may represent nothing.
     In Dorothea Tanning's poem below -- I found it at poets.org -- zero takes on still another of its roles, that of place-holder -- as in the numbers 101 and 5000, for example.

       Zero     by Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012)

       Now that legal tender has
                    lost its tenderness,
       and its very legality
               is so often in question.
       it may be time to consider
       the zero--
                    long rows of them.
            empty, black circles in clumps
                              of three, 

2014 (and prior) -- titles, dates of posts

Scroll down to find titles and dates of posts in 2014.  At the bottom are links to lists of posts through 2013 and 2012 and 2011 -- and all the way back to March 2010 when this blog was begun.   This link leads to a PDF file that lists searchable topics and names of poets and mathematicians presented herein. 

Dec 30  Be someone TO COUNT ON in 2015
Dec 28  A Fractal Poem
Dec 25  A thousand Christmas trees
Dec 24  The gift of a poem
Dec 20  The Girl Who Loved Triangles 

Be someone TO COUNT ON in 2015

By any means of counting, 

the number of incarcerated persons in the United States 

is TOO LARGE

and the proportion of prisoners with BLACK SKIN

is TOO GREAT
  and there is TOO MUCH VIOLENCE and DEATH in our prisons.

RESOLVE to stop the violence (RSVP)  in America's prisons!  Work for fair sentencing and Equal Justice!  Let your resolutions for the New Year 2015 be inspired by a poem;  the one below is from Poetry, 2009, found at poetryfoundation.org  -- and you may find more at Split This Rock.

To the voice of the retired warden of Huntsville Prison
(Texas death chamber)                 by Averill Curdy

Until wolf-light I will count my sheep,
       Adumbrated, uncomedic, as they are.
       One is perdu, two, qualm, three
                           Is sprawl, four, too late,

A Fractal Poem

    A fractal is an object that displays self-similarity -- roughly, this means that the parts have the same shape as the whole -- as in the following diagram which shows successive stages in the development of the "box fractal" (from Wolfram MathWorld). 

   
Michigan poet Jack Ridl and I share an alma mater (Pennsylvania's Westminster College) and we recently connected when I found mathematical ideas in the poems in his collection Broken Symmetry  (Wayne State University Press, 2006); from that collection, here is "Fractals" -- offering us a poetic version of self-similar structure:

       Fractals    by Jack Ridl

       On this autumn afternoon, the light  
       falls across the last sentence in a letter,
       just before the last movement of Brahms’ 
       Fourth Symphony, a recording made more 
       than 20 years ago, the time when we were  
       looking for a house to rehabilitate, maybe