Recently I found (on X @letsplaymath) this thoughtful and poetic musing by Denise Gaskins :
Mathematical beauty
is when our mind's eye is opened
to see something new -- or
to see something old in a new light.
A good friend who is a strong and active supporter of math-poetry links is Annapolis Naval Academy Professor Greg Coxson -- and, in a recent article (in this newsletter from a subgroup of the Mathematical Association of America -- MAA) entitled "Meet Me on the Bridge Between Mathematics and Poetry," Coxson offers several poems. One of these is "The Art of Numbers" by Scotland mathematician-poet Eveline Pye -- and she has given me permission to offer it in my blog:
The Art of Numbers by Eveline Pye
We talk of beautiful words, art, buildings
when they're not part of the natural world.
An x in Algebra is no more abstract than
an idea in philosophy, just more useful.
Split This Rock is an activist poetry organization that calls poets to a greater role in public life and reaches out to a network of socially engaged poets; the organization is centered in Washington, DC but reaches all over the world . . . One of their ongoing activities is the selection of a Poem of the Week -- and one of their recent choices was a challenging and fascinating poem that included frequent uses of mathematical notation to express its ideas.
Submission Deadline -- September 24, 2025
Space Byi *2025 is an experimental digital art platform dedicated to exploring the intersection of mathematics, geometry, and artistic expression. As an official pavilion of The Wrong Biennale, they provide "a space for artists, mathematicians, and creative thinkers to engage in boundary-pushing visual and conceptual explorations."
In particular, this site extends a call for mathematical poetry -- information at this link -- to be submitted via email on or before September 24, 2025 -- to Radoslav Rochallyi at info@rochallyi.com.
One of the strong and consistent promoters of connections between mathematics and the arts is Sarah Hart and she recently gave the 2025 Einstein Public Lecture at Clemson University (sponsored by AMS, the American Mathematical Society) entitled "A Mathematical Journey Through Literature."
Hart is the author of Once Upon a Prime: The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature (Flatiron Books, 2023) -- NYTimes review here; purchase info here. Her presentation, summarized here in an AMS article entitled "The Axiom of a Sonnet," explored ways that the guidelines for a sonnet -- or other poetic structure -- are similar to the guidelines for a mathematical structure such as a group or a ring. A thought-provoking quote from her presentation:
Several weeks ago I was surprised and delighted to receive an email from Lillian Liu, a high school student in Westchester, New York and also is a mentee of the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) -- with mentor Dr. Annalisa Crannell, emerita professor at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania and someone I have been privileged to know.
High school junior Lillian Liu has recently founded The Hyperbolic Review -- her response to noticing that "mathematical poetry isn’t as widely discussed or recognized as it should be. It seemed that many people weren’t even aware of its existence." Because this blog shows my connection with mathy poetry, Liu reached out to me, via email, and sent me this link to Issue 1 of The Hyperbolic Review: https://www.thehyperbolicreview.com/issue-1.
Below I offer the opening stanzas of "Asymptotes" by Devanshee Soni; following this sample will be a link to The Hyperbolic Review -- containing the complete poem and lots of others.
Once again, my mathematician-poet-friend Sarah Glaz has carefully organized a math-poetry reading -- this one to be held at the upcoming Bridges Math-Arts Conference, July 14-18, 2025 in Eindhoven, Netherlands. Details concerning the exact time and location for the reading, scheduled for Thursday, July 17, will be announced here at this link.
Below I offer a sampling from the poets who will be reading at Eindhoven -- a CENTO that I have built by inclusion of a phrase from a poem by each of the poets registered for participation in Bridges 2025. (Information about the poets is found here at this website maintained by Sarah Glaz.)
WE CELEBRATE MATHEMATICS
The power of a theorem lies
with a diagram of clockwise arrows
hovering high over the town,
while infinite time is waiting
and triple sixes strive
in-between our beginnings and ends.
One of my very-special math-poetry connections -- and a frequent sharer of new poems with me -- is Gregory Coxson, Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Recently he sent me the poem "Math Class" by Poet Mary Crow -- a poem that deals with the role of women in math. I offer its opening lines below, followed by a link to the complete poem. (A good poem to stimulate class discussion of the currently-growing status of women in math.)
Math Class by Mary Crow
Somehow that shriveled arm
seemed the perfect arm
for tracing the odd shapes of geometry
in white on our black chalkboard
showing us a woman could do
this unwomanly thing
and sometimes a girl would let out a giggle
almost like a pig squeak
and our teacher would stop, chalk
in her lifted hand
and her back would stiffen
as she turned and glared at us
then returned
to tracing out her mysteries
we girls thought
meant math is for old maids . . .
Crow's complete poem is available online here at poets.org.
A worthy organization in Washington, DC in which to get involved is FREE MINDS BOOK CLUB (https://freemindsbookclub.org/about-us/) -- an organization that collects books and provides reading opportunities for incarcerated individuals AND ALSO offers online presentations of poems (https://freemindsbookclub.org/poems/) for volunteers to read and offer comments. I encourage you to participate -- participants need not be poets, simply interested readers!
Here are the opening lines of one of the poems I found at the Free Minds website; please visit the site to sign in and read more:
Here at the website We Are Teachers I found a delightful collection of 38 Math Poems for Students in All Grade Levels. Although I liked the offering there of "Eighteen Flavors" by Shel Silverstein I found the sample there to be incomplete (only ten flavors) and I searched further to find Silverstein's complete poem (found here) and, ice-cream lover that I am, I offer it below:
A Pennsylvania poet whose work I enjoyed and learned from has recently passed away -- Harry Humes, who taught literature and film at Kutztown (PA) University and produced and edited (until his retirement in 1999) a bi-annual poetry journal, Yarrow.
Humes' poetry was not mathy but I connected with it deeply because we had Pennsylvania in common, Back in 2010, in the early days of this blog, I posted Humes' poem "The Butterfly Effect" at this link. Here is a screenshot of the poem's opening lines:
Recent Presidential misstatements and distortions of American politics and policies are disturbing -- and I have pulled from my shelf a literary anthology This Is What America Looks Like. published in 2021 by the Washington Writers Publishing House and containing fiction and poetry from writers in DC, Maryland, and Virginia. (Purchase is available at amazon.com.) In this collection I found, in the poem "D.C." by Donald Illich, the phrase "here, where presidents lied" -- and since the poem contains a couple of quantitative words, I offer it below:
D.C. by Donald Illich
I'd never seen rats
crawl down city streets
until I came here,
where presidents lied,
Today I look back to this "Fib" posted last year and to other previous Earth Day postings. -- as I HOPE that we can learn to save our planet!
A brief reminder that the STEAM POWERED POETRY VIDEO CONTEST -- announced in this this posting from last November -- has its entry deadline approaching very soon -- on Wednesday, April 30. And here is a direct link to contest information.
Write a poem . . .Create a video of you reading it . . . SUBMIT!
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