Making something of nothing

     Was zero invented or discovered?  When and how?  By whom?  In "The Origin of Zero" -- an article published in 2009 in in Scientific American --  John Matson introduces an interesting history of zero (something vs. nothing and so on...).  Recently through the Splendid Wake poetry project (with an open-to-all meeting on Friday March 21 -- go here for details) I have connected with Washington DC poet William Rivera who has shared with me this poem that also examines the puzzle of the somethingness of nothing.

Nothing Changes Everything     by William Rivera

Tomorrow is Pi Day

     Tomorrow is Pi Day and I offer no new poems but supply links to several previous posts.  Poetry of π may be found on 23 August 2010 (an "irrational sonnet" by Jacques Bens),  6 September 2010 (featuring work by Kate Bush,  Robert Morgan and Wislawa Szymborska),  10 September 2010 (mnemonics for π, especially from Mike Keith) , 15 March, 2011,(a poem by Lana Hechtman Ayers)  27 November 2011 (a poem by Brian McCabe) and 10 March 2013 (the opening lines of a poem "3.141592 . . ." by Peter Meinke).

Tragedy of the Commons

Thinking in syllable-squares,
recalling ecologist Garrett Hardin (1915-2003)
and his 1968 wisdom, "Tragedy of the Commons."

Maximum               
may not be                   
optimum.

SHE measures the heavens . . .

Today is International Women's Day, celebrated with a charming video at google.com and here with lines from Enheduanna (2285-2250 BCE), the earliest woman known to me who was both poet and mathematician.

     The true woman who possesses exceeding wisdom,
     She consults a tablet of lapis lazuli,
     She gives advice to all lands,
     She measures off the heavens, she places the
               measuring cords on the earth.

These lines (found in the preface, translated from Sumerian sources by Ake W Sjoberg and E Bergmann S J) and much more poetry-with-math are found in Strange Attractors:  Poems of Love and Mathematics (AK Peters, 2008) -- a collection edited by Sarah Glaz and me.

A poetry album by Lucille Clifton

March is Women's History Month and here, today, I celebrate by acknowledging a special woman, Lucille Clifton (1936-2010).  From 1979–1985 Clifton served as Poet Laureate of Maryland.  Her poetry celebrates both her African-American heritage and her womanhood.  Here is "album," a poem in Clifton's spare and un-capitalized style -- and containing a few numbers to help us keep track of the times that are changing.

album     by Lucille Clifton

Sociology of Numbers

Robert Dawson is a mathematics professor at St Mary's University in Halifax, Nova Scotia -- an active mathematician who complements his research activity with mathematics education and with poetry. The following Dawson poem appeared here in 2013 -- in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, a journal whose every issue contains some poetry-with-mathematics.

Some Contributions to the Sociology of Numbers     by Robert Dawson

The ones you notice first are the natural  numbers.
Everybody knows their names; they are the anchors,
the stars, the alphas, the reference points. And of course
the rational numbers, who hang out with them,
sit next to them in arithmetic class.

Long division is difficult . . .

Last Monday included a visit with old friends of whom I see too little, Silver Spring artist Mark Behme -- with whom I did some art-poetry collaboration a few years  back -- and Chevy Chase artist-writer-economist-activist, Kyi May Kaung.  After lunch at nearby Mandalay we three walked to Mark's studio and hung out for a while, admiring and talking about his new work.  When I arrived home, I dug out several poems developed from Mark's sculpture -- finding some pieces I'd not thought about for a while.  Here is one of these, a mathy poem that partners with Mark's "Split Tales."

          Which Girl Am I?      by JoAnne Growney

          The girl who’s not forced to divide

          into the good girl and the real one

          is a lucky one.  I was eleven

          when I felt a crack begin.

Angles in Alaska

Last Thursday evening I was honored to read in Takoma Park's Third Thursday poetry series -- along with poets Judy Neri and Kathleen O'Toole -- and my reading focused on poems of my times in Alaska.  The brilliant geometry of  our 49th state affected me strongly and "Angles of Light" became the title poem for a chapbook I published with Finishing Line Press in 2009.  Here is section 3 (of 7) from that poem.

Excitement of Proving a Theorem

Wow!  From first sighting, I have loved this description:

       I prove a theorem and the house expands:
       the windows jerk free to hover near the ceiling,
       the ceiling floats away with a sigh.

These lines from "Geometry" by Rita Dove express -- as well as any string of twenty-four words I can think of -- the excitement experienced from proving a theorem.

Wartime recurrence

In mathematics, it is not unusual to define an entity using a recurrence relation. 
For example, in defining powers of a positive integer:
       The 2nd power of  7  may be defined as  7  x  7¹ ;
               the 3rd power of  7  may be defined as  7  times  7², 
              and the 4th power is  7  times  7³,
              and, in general, for any positive integer n,  7ⁿ⁺¹  =  7  x  7ⁿ. 

Several weeks ago I attended a reading of fine poetry here in Silver Spring at the Nora School  -- a reading that featured DC-area poets Judith Bowles, Luther Jett, and David McAleavey.  I was delighted to hear in "Recessional" -- one of the poems presented that evening by Jett -- the mathematical pattern of recurrence, building stepwise  with a potentially infinite number of steps (as with the powers of 7, above) into a powerful poem.  I include it below:  

Mother Courage -- and speaking of opposites

     Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) was a poet, but I have not found mathematics in his poems.  Still, I want to note here a fantastic performance of his play, Mother Courage and her Children, starring Kathleen Turner and a talented ensemble at Washington,DC's Arena Stage.  Invited by my neighbors, Mitzi and Pati, I joined them yesterday for a riveting performance.   Here is a link to "How Fortunate the Man with None," a Brecht poem  heartily sung as "Solomon's Song" in the current musical production.
     And here, with a nod to the mathematical bent of this blog, is a quote from Brecht's Mother Courage that involves counting; also, it is one of many examples of a strategy that Brecht uses often and well -- encouraging an idea by speaking of its opposite.