One of my frequent interesting reads is the Quote of the Day #QOTD posted on Twitter by Mathematics & Statistics at St Andrews, @StA_Maths-Stats. A few days ago I found there the following mathy-poetic and thought-provoking quote by Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam (1909-1984):
The infinite
we shall do right away.
The finite
may take a little longer.
[Quoted in D MacHale, "Comic Sections" (first published in Dublin 1993)]
One of my favorite email subscriptions is to A.Word.A.Day -- a day-to-day collection each week (gathered by Anu Garg) of five related terms to learn anjoy. On April 15, I learned the new word arithmomania -- and quote the following from Garg's posting.
arithmomania PRONUNCIATION: (uh-rith-muh-MAY-nee-uh)
MEANING: noun: An obsessive preoccupation with numbers, calculations, and counting.
Richard Blanco: “An engineer, poet, Cuban American… his poetry bridges cultures and languages – a mosaic of our past, our present, and our future – reflecting a nation that is hectic, colorful, and still becoming.”
– President Joe Biden, conferring the National Humanities Medal on Blanco
RICHARD BLANCO is a professional civil engineer and a poet. He read his poem “One Today” at the second inauguration of President Barack Obama, who selected him to serve as the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet in U.S. history. Blanco's inauguration appearance is reported at this link and connection to his inaugural poem is offered there.
One of my current favorite math-poetry sources is Scientific American -- edited by feminist science writer Dava Sobel and presented each month under the heading Meter. The selection for December, 2022 was "Uncertain-Sea Principle" by Richard Blanco. Here are it's opening lines:
Each year the American Mathematical Society sponsors a student poetry contest-- looking for submissions from students in three categories -- junior high, senior high and college. This year's winners are:
“An Intriguing Mystery” by Jera Feem V. Forro, University of the Philippines Visayas Iloilo City High School
“Meditation on Mathematics” by Chelsea Zhu, Richard Montgomery High School
"Infinity Is Known by Many Names" by Jasmin Mundi, American University
A poster of the winning poems (shown below) is available for order at this link -- where one also finds You-Tube videos of the poets reading their winning poems. For more information about the contest and names of honorable-mention poets and previous years' winners, go here.
An organization that I celebrate -- though not often enough -- is the Association for Women in Mathematics which celebrates its 53rd birthday today. Join me in a visit to the AWM website to explore their programs and a visit to this blog post from 3 years ago that celebrates AWM with a poem.
A delightful stimulus to expand my vocabulary is my subscription to "A.Word.A,Day" by Anu Garg -- and each Monday-through-Friday I get an email notification of a new word. This week's theme is "Words from Geometry" and today's word is tangent -- go here to read, learn, and enjoy Garg's discussion of this word.
And here is a link to this blog's earlier postings that include poetic consideration of the term tangent.
Syllable-count patterns often are used in poems--helping to give a rhythmic tempo to the words. As I mention often, syllable counts -- and other word-patterns -- help me to discover new and special meanings to convey. When I start to write, my thoughts are scattered and need to be gathered and focused -- and a poetic form helps this to happen. The sonnet and the villanelle have long been valued examples of poetry patterns. More recent -- and more simple -- is the Fib. Introduced by poet Gregory Pincus back in 2006, the Fib is a six-line poem whose syllables are counted by the first six Fibonacci numbers: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8. (Each succeeding Fibonacci number is the sum of the two that precede it.)
Since 2006, a journal aptly named The Fib Review has offered (available at this website) more than 40 issues of poems, all of whose lines have syllable-counts that are Fibonacci numbers. Here is a portion of one of the poems -- by Washington-based poet Sterling Warner -- (the complete poem is found here).
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Yesterday, April 23, is the day on which William Shakespeare's birthday is celebrated; he was born long ago in 1564 and the actual date is uncertain. The BBC Radio Newshour today featured this event in its broadcast and told of ways that Shakespeare used mathematical ideas in his writing. A broadcast recording is available at this link; the Shakespeare-math info begins at approximately 25 minutes into the show. Ideas come from a book that is coming out next September, Much Ado About Numbers: Shakespeare's Mathematical Life and Times by Rob Eastaway.
One of the interesting items I found as I browsed was the phrase
eight score eight in Othello -- a three-syllable way for saying 168.
Here is a link to an article that focuses on Shakespeare's use of zero.
Save
our
Mother
Earth -- conserve
our resources, shift
to non-polluting substances.
As many of you readers know, the poem above is an example of a FIB -- a six-line poem with syllable-counts matching the first six Fibonacci numbers, When I sit down to write about a particular topic, I often find the the FIB format is a good way to start -- developing an idea starting with single words and gradually developing longer phrases. And, today, outside of this blog, I am trying to learn more about earth friendly substances.
If you have time to be interested in more mathy and earth-friendly poems, this link leads to the results of a blog search for climate change and this second link leads to previous Earth Day blog postings.
This link leads to postings -- and poems -- in this blog related to CLIMATE.
It is a delight to me to see math and science publications including poetry! Today I am enjoying the work of North Carolina poet Britt Kaufmann -- Kaufmann works as a math tutor -- and her poem "Midnight Calculus" appeared in the February 2024 issue of Scientific American. The accompanying bio mentioned that Kaufmann took her first calculus course at age 47.
More recently, under the heading "In Celebration of National Poetry Month," MAA FOCUS, the Newsmagazine of the Mathematical Association of America. another Kaufmann poem appeared, "Z-score of Zero." (A z-score measures exactly how many standard deviations above or below the mean a particular data-number is.) Kaufmann gives us a thoughtful poetic reflection of math on life!
California poet Carol Dorf is a retired math teacher and writer of a very varied library of poems, including many with math connections. It has been my pleasure to read with her at math-poetry readings and to include a number of her poems here in my blog. (This link leads to a list of my many postings of her work here in this blog.)
Browsing online today, I have come across still another one of Dorf's mathy poems which I would like to share. Here are the opening lines of "Spring Again: -- and the complete poem is found here at poetryfoundation.org.
Poet Emily Lutken's first career was as a physician -- she specialized in family medicine and spent many years of practice in the Navaho Nation. Following this she taught middle and high school math and science for several years , , , and now, retired, she has time for music, poetry, and other arts.
On my shelf --- for my frequent rereading and enjoyment -- is a copy of Lutken's 2021 collection, Manifold: poetry of mathematics. (3: A Taos Press, 2021). Here is a favorite poem of mine from that collection:
Prime Syllable Song by Emily Lutken
Prime
numbers
do not care
to make a rhyme.
They blaze wild pathways.
While others tow the line,
they play crwths or smash guitars,
unlike composite counts assigned
to echo harmonic notes in time
and avoid the oddball and ill-defined.
Without primes, though, the music would be boring,
the sing-song regularity, the constant whine
would drive all of us absolutely batshit bonkers.
This link leads to more information about Manifold, in which the poem above is found. This link leads to Lutken's website -- which includes more poetry and a bio of the poet.
This link leads to a poem by Lutken about a solar eclipse.
Another of Lutken's poems, "Ars Parabola," appears in this blog at this link.
"Math problems take on new meaning in this class that combines rhymes and verse with math instruction."
The above quotation comes from the website The Conversation, from a series entitled Uncommon Courses -- a series that highlights unconventional approaches to teaching. In an article entitled "Rhyme and reason -- why a university professor uses poetry to teach math," Ricardo Martinez -- who teaches mathematics education at Penn State University -- tells how math problems take on new meaning in a class that combines rhymes and verse with math instruction.
I have always enjoyed writing poetry. As a high school mathematics teacher, I recall telling my students that everything is and can be connected to math, even creative writing. Then, as a graduate student, I read about people using “I am” poem templates for young people to express who they are through a series of “I am” statements, and I thought to myself, where is the “I am” math poem template? So I created one.
Found today on X (Twitter):
Here is a link to a copy of the 1850 Chebyshev article. This link provides information about Pafnutii (or Pafnuty) Chebyshev (1821-94) and this link leads to info about Joseph Bertrand (1822-1900).
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