April celebrates both MATH and POETRY

April is National Poetry Month and Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month!  Found at the website We are Teachers, a collection of 38 poems for math students; here is one:

Math meets Poetry -- Student's Senior Project

      Lawrence "Larry" Lesser is a mathematics and statistics professor at the University of Texas in El Paso -- and is also an active poet and song-writer.  This link leads to my previous inclusions of his poetry and ideas earlier in this blog.  Recently one of Lesser's Facebook postings led me to an article about a student at Kalamazoo College in Michigan who combined math with poetry for her senior project.  This article about Elizabeth "Lizzy" Rottenberk tell how her loves for mathematics and poetry connect and it offers the following sample math-poetry pair:

A blog posting written by ChatGPT 3.5

     For a long time I have been curious about what would result if I asked AI to write a blog post for me.  One day recently I signed in at https://chat.openai.com/ and was asked by ChatGPT 3.5,  "How can I help you today?"  Copied and pasted below is our conversation (copied from this link).  (I am disappointed that ChatGPT's respones did not, as my postings usually do, include a poem.)  Read -- and reflect!

I have a blog entitled "Intersections -- Poetry with Mathematics" and I would like Chat GPT to write a blog posting for me.  

From ChatGPT: 

Title: Exploring the Symmetry of Numbers: A Mathematical Poetic Journey

Welcome back to "  Intersections -- Poetry with Mathematics"! Today, let's delve into the captivating world where numbers and poetry intertwine, creating harmonies of symmetry and rhythm. Join me on this whimsical voyage where mathematical concepts dance with lyrical verses, inviting you to see the beauty in both.

They Say She WAS GOOD (for a woman)!

     March is Women's History Month; March 23 1882 is the birthdate of Emmy Noether (1882-1935).  Here is a photo of Noether from a  Twitter X posting from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at St. Andrews -- and it is followed by a stanza from a poem about Noether that I was inspired to write many years ago; following those lines, a link to previous poetic postings about Noether in this blog.

       

March 21 -- Celebrate World Poetry Day

 This blog has lots of poetry possibilities!

Scroll down and choose a mathy poem!

READ and CELEBRATE!

Honoring Math Teacher and Poet, Amy Uyematsu

      On Saturday, March 23 at 2 PM, a poetry-event is planned at Descanso Gardens in La Cañada Flintridge, California to celebrate the life of poet, math teacher, and activist Amy Uyematsu (1947-2023).  It was my pleasure to be connected to Amy via various math-related events and her work has been included in previous postings in this blog.  (Here's a link to a list of those earlier posts.)

     One of my favorite poems of Amy's is  "The Meaning of Zero:  A Love Poem."  The complete poem is found here at Poets. org and in the collection Strange Attractors:  Poems of Love and Mathematics-- and I offer its opening stanzas below.

Uyematsu's complete poem is available at this link.

Discovery Tool -- Following a Pattern

     When I pick up a pen to write on a particular subject, often it is useful me to try to follow a pattern for rhymes or syllable-counts -- for the effort to conform to a pattern challenges me to think about my topic in new ways.  In the history of poetry, rhyme-choices were frequent--yielding sonnets, villanelles and a variety of other forms.  

     In recent years, online and printed versions of poems have become very accessible and the principle, "Rhymes help us remember" has become less of a focus in poetry.  One of the popular connections between math and poetry has been the use of Fibonacci numbers to choose syllable counts;  especially  popular has been the FIB, a six-line stanza in which the syllable-counts are 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, and 8 -- the first six Fibonacci numbers.  (Inventor of the FIB was Greg Pincus, and lots of information is provided here in this 2010 blog posting, Poems with Fibonacci number patterns.)  

Celebrate Pi

     Soon it will be Pi-Day (3.14) and this year I again call your attention to a poem by one of my long-time favorite poets -- the poem "Pi" by Polish Nobel Prize-winning poet Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012).   I offer a portion of the poem below (followed by a link to the complete poem).

from    Pi     by Wiwlawa Szymborska  

 (translated from Polish by Clare Cavanaugh and Stanislaw Baranczak (1946-2014)).

     The admirable number pi:
     three point one four one
     All the following digits are also initial,
     five nine two because it never ends.
     It can’t be comprehended six five three five at a glance,
     eight nine by calculation,
     seven nine or imagination,
     not even three two three eight by wit, that is, by comparison
     four six to anything else
     two six four three in the world.
     The longest snake on earth call it quits at about forty feet.
     Likewise, snakes of myth and legend, though they may
                hold out a bit longer.
     The pageant of digits comprising the number pi
     doesn’t stop at the page’s edge.        . . .
               .  .  . 

The entire Szymborska-poem is may be found here at the website "Famous Poets and Poems" and also here in an online pdf of the booklet Numbers and Faces:  A Collection of Poems with Mathematical Imagery -- a collection that I edited on behalf of the Humanistic Mathematics Network.

This link connects to a list of previous blog-posts of Pi-related poems. 

Celebrating Women who write Mathy Poems

       Now in March -- in Women's History Month -- many writers are taking a bit of extra time to explore the history and achievements of women.  It was my delight to find a March 6 posting here on the Poetry Blogging Network with a list of celebrated women in poetry that includes several writers of mathy poems.  Of the ten poets listed, the following five have been included in this blog -- in earlier postings.  For each, I include a mathy sample and the poet's name is linked to earlier postings that include their work.

     Adrienne Rich   from Planetarium 

             a woman      ‘in the snow     
             among the Clocks and instruments              
             or measuring the ground with poles  

            in her 98 years to discover    
            8 comets

Multiple Meanings -- in Poetry, Math, and Jokes

     One of the challenging AND enriching qualities of both mathematics and poetry is the multiplicity of meanings that particular expressions may have. This quality also is found in jokes -- and in the Math Blog of MIT math-scholar Tanya Khovanova I recently enjoyed some entertaining mathy riddle-jokes and below I offer a sample: 

Here is a link to Khovanova's complete blog-posting.  Enjoy!

For biographical and contact information for Khovanova, here is a link to her webpage -- and here as a link to her poem "Nerdy Wedding" and, finally, a link to an earlier posting of her work in this blog.

A poem-title that drew me in -- "Calculus I, II, III"

      A poetry event that I often enjoy is the posting by the Academy of American Poets of a poem-a-day -- today's poem is found here  and  information about the posting is found here at Poets.org.  my background in mathematics helped me to be especially pleased early this month (on 2/2) when the daily poem (written by poet and artist Brad Walrond) was entitled "Calculus I, II, III" -- and if offers reflection on different levels of learning.  Below I offer a few lines from the poem; the complete poem is available at this link.

from     Calculus I, II, and III    by Brad Walrond

      . . .    this calculus

     —how one body
     relates to another—

     that disturbs all the peace

     is the same as learning
     their one two threes       . . .

   Copyright © 2024 by Brad Walrond.   Read more here.

Shaping poems with Pascal's Triangle

      One of my favorite websites to visit is "Poetry and Mathematics" -- a blog from poet Marian Christie.  Today I focus on her posting of poems with word-lengths structured by Pascal's Triangle; here is a sample:

Christie's complete Pascal Triangle posting -- with a triangle for each season -- is available at this link. 

 AND, here is a link to previous connections to Christie and her work in this blog. 

Mathematician, Poet -- Blind to the worth of Women

     As we study mathematics and learn of outstanding mathematicians, many of us do not also learn which of those mathematicians also were poets.  A posting that I found recently in Marian Christie's blog, Poetry and Mathematics, features poetry by  Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831-39).

     Maxwell's verse also is featured in the math-poetry anthology, Strange Attractors:  Poems of Love and Mathematics (A.K Peters, Ltd., 2008);  preview available here at amazon.com.

     Below I offer a stanza from a Maxwell poem (posted in this blog back in December, 2015) -- a stanza that shows the long-mistaken attitude that has existed about inferior abilities of math-women: 

Poems of Math -- from a teacher and his students

      Occasionally I Google the pair "mathematics, poetry" to see what a web search can find for me.  Many of the sites found this way are familiar -- including this blog and poetry I have cited herein.  But a few days ago I found a new site -- posted by the New England Literary Resource Center and featuring poems by a GED teacher Phillip Howard (at the Adult Literacy Center at Dorchester, MA) and his students.  Howard asks his students to write poems about math as a way of communicating their accomplishments and frustrations.   Here is the poem that Howard offers his students; their responses are collected here. 

       Me & Math       by  Phillip Howard

          I have a problem … a math problem
          Math is always throwing problems at me
          I solve 1 and Boom   Math throws a harder 1
          A Brain Buster … so I rage
          But I can’t GIVE UP MATH
          Math is in my blood … PROBLEMS CALL 2 ME
          I want 2 BREAK THE HABIT … but I can’t
          So I push MATH
          I push on the WEB
          I push on the STREETS
          I push in the CLASS
          I push MATH 2 YOU
          So YOU 2 have a MATH PROBLEM