Math-Poetry for a virtual BRIDGES Conference

     Due to the COVID-19 pandemic this year's 2020 Bridges Math-Arts Conference will not be held.  One of the regular events at this international conference has been a poetry reading organized by mathematician and poet Sarah Glaz.  This year, Glaz has prodded math-poets to develop on-line videos of their poems and offers a wonderful program of poetry here at this link.  (Brief poet-bios and links to more info about each are also found at the preceding link.)

Participating poets, with links to their poetry videos are: 

Sarah Glaz,  Tatiana Bonch-Osmolovskaya,   Robin Chapman,  Marian Christie,  Carol Dorf,  Susan Gerofsky,  Emily Grosholz,  Gizem Karaali,  Lisa Lajeunesse,  Marco Lucchesi,   Alice Major,   Mike Naylor,   Eveline Pye,  Stephanie Strickland,  Ursula Whitcher,

Marion Cohen,   Maria Mannone reads Federico Favali's poem,   JoAnne Growney    Hedy Hempe,   Philip Holmes,    Lawrence (Larry) Lesser,  Kaz Maslanka,  Daniel May,   Iggy McGovern,   Tom Petsinis,   Susan Sulic.

Thank you, Sarah Glaz, for organizing and presenting all of this poetry!

We look forward to the forthcoming BRIDGES 2020 Poetry Anthology

Wonderful math-poetry . . . in lots of online places

      Carol Dorf, poetry editor of the online journal, TalkingWriting, has been sharing (during the pandemic) daily poems via e-mail -- and occasionally they are a bit mathematical.  For example, "Morning Song" by Sawako Nakayasu (found here at Poets.org) has this opening line . . . .

     Every time, these days, it seems, an equation gets forced.  . . .

At Poets.org, as at many poetry websites, there is an opportunity to search -- using, for example, "geometry" or "equation" -- and to find lots of poems with mathematical connections.

     Carol Dorf is a retired math teacher and a wonderful poet;  this link leads to poems from her published in this blog and this link leads to "Wild Equations,"   a collection of some the mathy poems found in TalkingWriting.

     An ongoing source of original and delightful math-poetry is the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.  Visit often and explore! 

AND, one more item . . .  Recently I revisited Issue 17 (Released November 1, 1917)  of The Cordite Poetry Review which has the theme "Mathematics."  That issue is online here.  Many of the poems seem at first quite distant from the theme -- but browsing the collection of 60 poems (selected by Fiona Hile) has proved thought-provoking.  Here is a sample, "Venn Diagram" by Caroline Williamson.

Life Lessons in Math and Rhyme

     One of my former colleagues at Pennsylvania's Bloomsburg University is statistician Reza Noubary.  This Iran-born mathematician has a love of poetry as well as mathematics and here are a few lines from his recent collection, Feelings and Dealings (Archway Publishing, 2020).

                    In a math book there is wisdom.

                    In a theorem there is a kingdom.

                    No solution can be made up or faked.

                    The reasoning buys you freedom.

There is a secret in every equation that provokes curiosity and passion.

To uncover it we need to see its beauty and realize

its worth to complete the mission.

The outcome is refreshing; it always results in long-term compassion.

It is satisfying as participants understand its

logic and its beautiful expression.

Thank you, Reza, for these words.

 

Independence . . .

     Tomorrow, July 4, the US celebrates "Independence" Day and I am reflecting on the following quote by Albert Einstein (1879-1955):

     How can it be that mathematics, 
     being after all a product of human thought 
          . . . independent of experience, 
     is so admirably appropriate
     to the objects of reality?

(found here, along with lots of Einstein quotes) 

I am trying to decide to what degree I agree with Einstein's words.

Opening our minds to New Views . . .

     One of the values of study of mathematics is that to make progress we must continually revise our ways of looking at things. (Yes, there can be numbers less than zero . . . Yes, there can be different sizes for infinite sets . . . )  And a challenge for our society today is to carefully reconsider our racism.   Recently the American Mathematical Society's Blog On Math Blogs has offered this thoughtful posting, "What does anti-racism in mathematics look like?"  
     From visual poet Karl Kempton (who celebrates a birthday today) I offer a visual-poetry reminder of multiple ways of viewing a situation -- illustrated by two views of dividing the number 8.

For more ways of looking at 8 and other mathematical poems by Kempton, go here.

Considering opposites . . . and finding union . . .

     The categorization of different points of view as opposites can disappear as a unified system embraces both of them.  In mathematics, the counting numbers and their opposites become the integers,the rational and irrational numbers join to give the reals, the real and imaginary numbers yield the complex numbers.  In our global world with its biases and dangers and uncertainties, we will, I hope, evaluate our differences and unite our strengths to form a larger, stronger unity.
     A syllable-square poem by Carmela Martino (offered below) illustrates one of the unifications that can benefit our society: inclusion of the arts to enrich the sciences, from STEM forming STEAM.

Carmela Martino's poem first appeared here at TeachingAuthors.

Math-poetry in The Mathematical Intelligencer

     In a recent e-mail, this message:  "The Mathematical Intelligencer. Vol. 42 No. 2 is now available online."  Most Intelligencer articles require a subscription or a fee-payment but one that is freely available to all of us is the poem, "Pandemic Math:  X and Y Axes" by Wisconsin painter and poet Robin Chapman.  Here are its opening lines:

          I'm thinking of those graphs we anxiously scan each day
          carry news of infection's spread, asking if we
          will find death stalking our neighborhoods . . .

Chapman's complete poem is available here.  

Counting on ... and on ... BLACK LIVES MATTER!

     In these days of learning to recognize the racism and racial injustice that has gone on in the United States for SO LONG I am reminded of a poem, "Learning to Count" by Romanian poet Nichita Stanescu (1933-1983) (posted at this link back in 2011), a poem that captures the horror of barbarianism.

     Learning to count     by Nichita Stanescu                   
                        
     Hairy and sweaty sit                            
     the barbarian Hittites.       
     Learning to count they pull from corpses
     fingers, legs, arms, eyes.                                    
     Oh, divided ones,    
     how bloody              
     is the idea of having ideas!  

Principles of Accounting -- in verse!

      Quarantining has turned poetry readings into Zoom events -- and that brought Pennsylvania poet Barbara Crooker to my computer a couple of weeks ago via a reading sponsored by The Word Works..  A delight for me to reconnect with someone whom I knew from my years in Bloomsburg.  Barbara -- who is a very fine poet one whose work has often appeared on The Writer's Almanac  -- has given me permission to share the following mathy poem (found in her collection, Some Glad Morning, Pitt Poetry Series, 2019).

      Principles of Accounting      by Barbara Crooker

     Nearly summer, and the trees are banking on green,
     calculating their bonuses in numerators of leaves.
     Outside my window, the crows are ganging up
     on someone, thugs in their hoodies of night.
     I'm feeling the number of days begin to feel finite,
     no longer uncountable as blades of grass. 

Everybody counts -- Axioms for diversity

Found here in the 2016 Notices of the American Mathematical Society --

these words that are mathematical, poetic AND important!

 

Unconscious(?) bias

       Wherever she goes
       there is mathematics --
       but THEY don't call
       her a mathematician . . .  
                                       SHE
       is a girl
       or a woman,
       a teacher,
       a student 
                    or perhaps
       a scholar,
                    maybe 
       an aspiring poet . . .
  

Learning from Copernicus

     These days are challenging ones -- HOW can we live safely?  How can we live morally? How can we learn that none of us is the center of the universe?
     Today, read the poetic words of Paul Tran and consider these questions.

     Copernicus   by Paul Tran (from The New Yorker, link below)

     Who doesn’t know how
     doubt lifts the hem of its nightgown

     to reveal another inch of thigh
     before the face of faith?

     I once didn’t. I once thought I was
     my own geometry,
     my own geocentric planet

Does nothing exist?

     From Montreal mathematician, poet, and artist Alex Ionut, this highly imaginative poem, "The Empty Set Exists."  -- a poem stimulated by his study of the Euler spiral (clothoid) and a 3-D version that he calls "the spherical clothoid."  

       The empty set exists   by Alexandru Ionut

       To see her would be like touching death
       It's axiomatic, the foundation of any metric
       You love her because she's her

       Double entendre across the stanza
       But her hair, only spirals

       My love for her, pure vector
       Imaginary, hypercomplex
       Unmixed evil, I bow to Lord Kelvin
       Maxwell's demon, my Hamiltonian angel  

Women in Theory -- Math to Give

     The June, 2020 Conference of Women in Theory (of Computer Science) has been postponed to next year.  But these energetic mathy women got together virtually and performed a song.  I offer below the opening stanzas;  for the performance and complete lyrics, follow this link to YouTube.

      I Will Survive   (lyrics by Avi Wigderson (Princeton, IAS)

      At first I was afraid, I was petrified
      I worried I could never fit this proof on just one slide
      But then I spent so many nights 
                     thinking why it is so long
      And I grew strong
      And learned exactly what went wrong

      A problem wor-thy, of attack
      Just proves its worth by vigorously fighting back
      I should have used error correction, 
                     should have sampled yet again
      I should have stayed the course 
                     and found there is so much that I can gain
          . . .

For the YouTube version (with lyrics) of the complete song (8 stanzas), go here.