An Ode to Mathematics

     One of the math-poets that I have met through this blog is Foteck Ivota, a mathematics teacher in the Cameroon.  In an email message, Ivota has offered this point of view:
       I love poetry too so much and I believe poetry  can be used as a means of making students love and develop interest in mathematics. As teachers of this beautiful subject we face a lot of challenges to make students perceive maths as easy and down to earth.   
     Ivota also has shared several poems with me; here is one of them:

      An Ode to Mathematics     by Foteck Ivota

       Your merits, maths, many may miss
       And in ignorance may dismiss
       Marvelous Maths that is life,
       Believing that all is strife.

            Chorus:
                 Maths for you and Maths for me,
                 Maths, Maths and Maths for all,
                 Maths, Maths for everything.    

Mother-daughter geometry -- in poetry . . .

     Last week (July 9) was the birthday of my mother -- and, although her body lies in a grave, her spirit continues to dance (and to both inform and confuse me).  Recently published in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics (January 2019 issue) this poem by Jenny Patton -- a creative writing teacher at Ohio State University and a wellness coach -- has been provoking my memories. 

       Geometry of Night     by Jenny Patton

       In three-dimensional Euclidean space,
       lines in a plane that do not meet are parallel.

       My beautiful aunt loved to sleep, blogs
       my insomniac cousin about my mother
       who went to her parallel life every night.

       Those studying Playfair’s axiom note the
       constant distance between parallel lines. 

Euler's Vision -- in Verse

      Scheduled to be read at the Mathematical Association of Victoria's annual conference in December of this year is a poetical choral piece for eight voices entitled "Euler's Vision" -- composed by Tom Petsinis -- a Melbourne writer (poet, playwright, and novelist) and mathematician.  Here are the opening lines:

From "Euler's Vision" by Tom Petsinis

Visual Poetry -- Newton's Third Law

     One of the long-term and talented producers and advocates of mathematical visual poetry is Kaz Maslanka; his long-term mathematical-poetry blog is found here.  Maslanka is a featured participant in The Film and Video Poetry Society's 2019 program.  On Saturday, August 3, in Pasadena, CA, Maslanka will offer a presentation entitled "Mathematics and Digital Art."  In addition, work by Maslanka on display (July 11 - August 3) at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art.  Kaz has sent me this photo of one of his featured (backlit) images:

Newton's Third Law in Karmic Warfare

by Kazmier Maslanka

Digital painting displayed as a Duratrans

Fighting the heat -- with limericks!

     Brief poems with strict patterns -- like the FIB and the LIMERICK -- are often used to convey mathy messages.  Recently this limerick caught my eye (found at madkane.com).

       Heated Limerick     by Madeleine Begun Kane

       One-hundred degrees? I may swoon.
       Yes, I’m singing a very hot tune.
       And I’m down in the mouth
       Cuz this isn’t the south,
       But Bayside, New York — early June.

At her long-standing and encyclopedic website, madkane.com, Kane offers lots more limericks -- and instructions for writing a limerick --  and also math-humor.  

     A wonderful source of math-humor and limericks is Ben Orlin's site, "Math with Bad Drawings."  Here is a sample:

A limerick for mathematicians -- by Ben Orlin

This next clever limerick -- originally first posted in this blog back in March 2010,  has been attributed to Leigh Mercer:  

A clever computational limerick -- by Leigh Mercer

To find limericks previously posted in this blog, use the SEARCH box in the right-hand column OR follow this link.

Out of Nothing -- A Strange New Universe

     Shashi Thutupalli is a scientist -- in Bangalore, India -- who enjoys poetry and often explores the connections between poetry and mathematics.   He has shared with me several samples of his work and I offer below the opening page (of three) of Thutupalli's poem, "Out of Nothing I Have Created a Strange New Universe."  (The full poem, together with artwork, is available in Visual Verse -- at this link.)

Page 1 of 3  -- the entire poem is found here at VisualVerse.org.

Also in Visual Verse is Thutupalli's "Dimensional Reduction' -- at this link. 

Counting to seventy . . .

    I am exited by last week's news that Oklahoma poet-- and member of the Muskogee Nation -- Joy Harjo has been appointed Poet Laureate of the United States.  Harjo came to poetry via music and she sees in poetry a way of making connections and building understanding.  
     Struggling through complexity to understanding is a similarity between poetry and mathematics. Beyond that basic connection, however, Harjo's poetry is not closely linked to mathematics.  EXCEPT:  One of her poems (found online at PoetryFoundation.org) follows a strict syllable count.  In a birthday tribute to a friend who has turned seventy, Harjo has produced a seventy-line poem in which the syllable counts proceed as 1, 2, 3, 4, . . . , 69, 70. (In the terminology of OULIPO, Harjo has produced a growth-only snowball.)   Here are the opening lines of Harjo's poem:

from Becoming Seventy     by Joy Harjo

                    Knoxville, December 27, 2016, for Marilyn Kallet’s 70th birthday.

                    This poem was constructed to carry any memory you want to hold close.

     We
     arrived
     when the days
     grew legs of night.  

Connecting with BRIDGES . . .

     Bridges Math-Arts Conferences have become an annual summer tradition and this year's conference is July 16-20 in Linz, Austria.  One of the participants in this year's Mathematical Poetry Program is University of British Columbia Professor Susan Gerofsky -- and I offer her "Desert Poem" below.  Gerofsky's poem was constructed using a permutation pattern called PH4 (from bell-ringing) and an explanation follows the poem.

               Desert Poem     by Susan Gerofsky

               Wings over dry land
               Over wings, land dry
               Over land, wings dry
               Land over dry wings
               Land dry over wings
               Dry land wings over
               Dry wings land over
               Wings dry over land --
               Wings over dry land.

Love, marriage, and number . . .

     Australian poet Richard Scutter has online collection of his own poems (this link leads to a chronological listing) and of favorite poems (go to this link and scroll down) by himself and others.  Here are samples:

        Marriage Mathematics

        each one bending
        to a heavenly plus
        couple greater value
                   1 + 1 = 3 + ...      

         ... and serious if a series starts
        but the minus of hell
        when one leaves  
                   2 – 1 = 0                          

   The poem was found (dated 18 June 2007) at this site.

Solve a puzzle -- find a poem!

     At Canada's Capilano University, Lisa Lajeunesse teaches in mathematics in the School of STEM -- and is an enthusiastic promoter of links between mathematics and the arts.  At the 2018 Bridges Math-Arts Conference she presented this paper on "Poetry Puzzles"; a sample puzzle is offered below.

                              Place 2 or 4 or 1 or 3

                              in each cell that is free.

                              When you finish each number should show

                              once in each column and once in each row.

                                                  When you've filled in each cell --
                                                  all the numbers are there --
                                                  you can then read the poem
                                                  from your solved square.   

Sailboat Mathematics

     Celebrated on June 2 at the Joaquin Miller Poetry Series Washington DC's Rock Creek Nature Center, poetry by winners of the  Jacklyn Potter Young Poets Competition, sponsored by The Word Works, Inc.  One of these winners, Julien Berman, is a student at Georgetown Day School and a prize winning writer and accomplished violinist AND a member of the GDS Math team.
     Here is Julien's winning poem:

Sailboat Mathematics     by Julien Berman

A stretched canvas tarp
Not ungainly in style, but again not cut in a perfect polygon.
A wooden beam or two
Slung upwards and out, at ninety degrees.     

Have fun with "The Pi Song"

     Often we celebrate the number pi -- ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, an infinite non-repeating decimal that begins with 3.1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 . . ..  Pi is a bridge between day-to-day mathematics that nearly all of us know and mathematics that is complex and difficult. 
     My own celebration of Pi includes these earrings -- but I have friends and former colleagues in the Bloomsburg University Department of Mathematics and Digital Sciences that celebrate Pi in a far more entertaining way -- in song.  Here is a link to the YouTube version of "The Pi Song" with lyrics by Bill Calhoun and Kevin Ferland and performed by "Professor Parody (Kevin Ferland).  Performance credits are found here.  And here is a link to some more details about the song.

Here is a link to a previous posting with more mathy song lyrics by Bill Calhoun.

Celebrating Walt Whitman . . .

     Last Friday -- May 31, 2019 -- was the 200th anniversary of the birth of American poet, Walt Whitman and the website of the Academy of American Poets offers poems by Whitman and background information to enrich our celebration.  Here, from his oft-revised-and-expanded Leaves of Grass (Signet Classics, 1960), is a poem -- "When I heard the learn'd astronomer" -- with mention of mathematics.  (Much of Whitman's work is available online here at Project Gutenberg.)

     WHEN I heard the learn'd astronomer
     When the proofs, the figures, were ranged before me,
     When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, 
               and measure them,

Delicious Geometry. . .words from Bertrand Russell

     Sometimes we find that words presented as prose are poetic . . . as these words of British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell (1872-1970):

          At the age of eleven, I began Euclid, 
          with my brother as my tutor. This was one 
          of the great events of my life, as dazzling 
          as first love. I had not imagined 
          that there was anything so delicious in the world.

— Bertrand Russell Autobiography: 1872-1914, (Routledge, 2nd Ed. 2000, p. 30).

More thoughtful quotes from Russell may be found here.