2019 Student Math-Poetry -- FREE Poster

MATH-POETRY POSTER!

A GREAT item for a classroom bulletin board!

Late in 2018 Maryland math students were invited to enter a math-poetry contest (go here and scroll down for contest rules) -- the winners were celebrated at the 2019 January Joint Mathematics Meetings in Baltimore and also here in this blog.  A poster of the winning poems is shown below AND is available by request from the American Mathematical Society, email: paoffice AT ams.org.  

Seek . . . and Find

     This blog has more than a thousand posts -- and many have been discovered as the days passed and are not organized by topic.  To explore, simply scroll down and encounter a variety of math-poetic views.  If you visit this post for March 18, 2019 you will find a list of titles and links to all of the previous posts.  If you are seeking a post on a particular topic, perhaps you will want to use the SEARCH feature in the right column of the blog.  For example, if you enter "math women" you get this list of postings. The SEARCH entry term "imaginary" leads to these posts.   Enjoy!

Poetic roots -- square, cube, . . .

     In the 2008 film, "Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, Kumar offers a poem, "Square Root of Three" -- a poem attributed to Dave Feinberg, and Feinberg has this to say about it:
          I wrote it during a high school biology class. A couple guys from my high school went on to write the Harold and Kumar movies, and they modified my poem for their movie. Originally, the poem began "I'm sure that I will never see a poem as lovely as root three," and it ended "when multiplied we stand up tall but when divided we will fall." I don't remember what else changed for the movie.
     In my email correspondence with Feinberg, he offered me a new poem to present here in my blog -- a sequel to the square root poem and a poem offered first here in his blog -- a poem about the CUBE root of three; enjoy:

       The Cube Root Of Three     by Dave Feinberg

       I take the cake, you must agree,
       for I'm a cube root of a three!
       There must be three of me to make
       a product you cannot mistake.   

If 1718 is a poem title . . .

If 1718 is a poem title, 

the poem should celebrate Marie Gaetana Agnesi (1718-1799)

author of the first book about both differential and integral calculus.

This post celebrates not only Agnesi (who was born 301 years ago today) but also present-day mathematician and writer Evelyn Lamb who produces lively and informative articles about STEM topics and people.  Go here to read Lamb's article about Agnesi for the Smithsonian Magazine on May 16, 2018 -- celebrating Agnesi's 300th birthday.

I'm tired of being a zero vector . ..

there are more       to figures       than ever meets       the eye

     Inexhaustible GOOGLE has led me to a website "The Best Philippine Short Stories" which contains not only stories but also artwork and poems.  Eileen Tupaz, now a central character in Quezon City's White Space Wellness Studio, has given me permission to include samples of her math poems first published by BPSS -- poems written in 2000 when she was a student at Ateneo de Manila University.

Poems by Eileen Tupaz

     soulmates
  
     we are all of us
     nonsingular creatures
     whose identities
     must be affirmed
     before our inverses
     can be found   

Dinner at a Math Conference . . .

     A strong advocates of humanistic mathematics -- supporting links between mathematics and the arts -- is Greg Coxson, both a poetry fan and a Research Engineer in the Department  Electrical and Computer Engineering at the US Naval Academy.  Greg has been, over the years of this blog, a valuable contributor of information about mathy poems and poets.  Recently Greg has turned his hand to some poetry of his own -- and he has sent me this:

Crawfish Dinner at a Computational Theory Conference 

by Greg Coxson

In this drama, the crawfish come off the best
   Offered by our host as a gift of local color,
They look up innocently from their pile,
   Radiant in their trim carmine carapaces.

Next, there are the computational theorists
   Many of them from a more formal continent
Some are my heroes I am seeing up-close now,
   Not from photos at the end of reference sections.   

What is TIME?

    Recently I have been reflecting on the capacity for multiple meanings -- a feature that strongly links mathematics and poetry; with this similarity in mind, I present a thought-provoking couplet, an epigram from one of my favorite poets, Rabindranath Tagore:

       'I have created the worlds,' proclaims Time.
       'And we have created you,' the clocks chime.

From Rabindranath Tagore: An Anthology, eds. Krishna Dutta, Andrew Robinson (Picador, 1997)

Celebrating math teachers

  This week (May 6-10) is 

   

  US Teacher Appreciation Week 2019  

    

  Celebrate your teachers with poems!  

   

This link leads to lots of previously-posted poems about math teachers.

Here is a sample (remembering my high school math teacher, Laura Church):

PLAY with math words . . . find a poem

A few days ago -- playing with math words -- I found this.

Here's a link to SEARCH results for this blog's presentations of "visual" poetry
and this link leads to information about the 
 NATIONAL MATHEMATICS FESTIVAL 

in Washington, DC this coming Saturday, May 4.

Al-gorithms . . . conform or suffer?

      Thanks to poet/mathematician Scott Williams who alerted me to this work by "a good poet and friend" Stephen Lewandowski, a retired conservation worker and author of 14 books (for example, One Foot) with another on the way.  Steve says this of his poem:  "SPELL" exists because I fear the misuse of algorithms to standardize people . . ."

A SPELL AGAINST AL-GORITHMS     by Stephen Lewandowski

Named for a man, Abu Ja-far Muhammed ibn Musa,
and the Persian city Khwarizma where he lived
in the year 800, pursuing calculations
arithmetical and al-gebraical.

Begins admirably as
“how to solve a class of problems” and
proceeds through disambiguation to specification by
massaging a mass of data.
If the data are people, then
the massage is called a “census.”  

Zero plus anything is . . .

     Poet Jane Hirshfield is an award-winning poet, essayist and translator whose work and I admire and enjoy.  In her collections I have found a thoughtful share of poems with links to mathematics -- and links to my previous postings of her work may be found here.  The MATH theme collection at poets.org has led me to another of her poems and I offer its opening stanzas here:

     Zero Plus Anything Is a World      by Jane Hirshfield

     Four less one is three.

     Three less two is one.

     One less three
     is what, is who,
     remains.     

Poems in support of Earth Day

     These words come from an editorial by Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post in September of 2018.

          Public awareness
          and pressure are
          the best hope
          for effective
          climate
          action.

This link leads to postings -- and poems -- in this blog related to CLIMATE.
And here is a link to several previous EARTH DAY postings..

A  fine source for lots more climate information is the Center for Mathematics and the Environment at the University of Exeter.   Another is 350.org -- which offers 350 poems of 3.5 lines each at this link; these poems came as part of a call for climate action for October 24, 2009.  Alas, it is ten years later and we have not answered the call.

Some of the Magic of THREE

The Universe in Verse -- an Earth-Day celebration of Science and Poetry

A NYC event on April 23 -- learn more here!

     In her brain-pickings website, Maria Popova offers myriad links between science and poetry -- and one of the poems she has, to my delight, reminded me of is "Renascence" by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950).  Here is the first stanza:

 from    Renascence   by Edna St. Vincent Millay

          All I could see from where I stood
          Was three long mountains and a wood;
          I turned and looked another way,
          And saw three islands in a bay.
          So with my eyes I traced the line
          Of the horizon, thin and fine,
          Straight around till I was come
          Back to where I’d started from;
          And all I saw from where I stood
          Was three long mountains and a wood.
              . . .

Millay goes on to speak of flat and wide, of spheres and Infinity . . .. a story related to the poems is available here and the entire poem is found here at PoetryFoundation.org.

If I had a million lives to live . . .

     This posting features Carl Sandburg's "Humdrum," a poem that reflects on "million."  (This poem and others by Sandburg may be found online at poets.org -- at this vast resource-site also is a collection of poems with math-themes.)  For me, Sandburg was the poet who introduced the idea that lines can be poetic without having rhyme.  (This link leads to several of my previous Sandburg-postings.)

       Humdrum     by  Carl Sandburg  (1878-1967)

       If I had a million lives to live
          and a million deaths to die
          in a million humdrum worlds,

       I’d like to change my name
          and have a new house number to go by