Mathematics and Poetry ARE Similar

        A recent email request sent me looking for a one-page article / quiz I had published in the American Mathematical Monthly in 1992 -- a list of 17 statements (quotations) each with a word missing.   The missing words are either "mathematics" or "poetry" (or a related word).  My claim is that, without using the author's name as a clue, it is difficult to decide which of these arts is intended.  I offer here the first four of the statements and suggest you reflect on missing words and then, if you wish, follow this link to a file with the entire list --   including also the author of each quote and (afterward) a list of the missing words.

_____  is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.   (Mathematics/Poetry)

To think the thinkable -- that is the ____'s aim.   (mathematician/poet)     

All _____ [is] putting the infinite within the finite.   (mathematics/poetry) 

The moving power of _____ invention is not reasoning 

                                                    but imagination.     (Mathematical/Poetic) 

The magic of mathematics (in art)

     Australian teacher and  poet Erica Jolly is convinced that breaking down the barriers that make silos of sciences and humanities subjects will promote better education systems and improve job prospects for students.  She brings mathematics into this engaging poem found in Holding Patterns, an online book of physics and engineering poems, part of the "Science Made Marvelous" project.

Sculpture at Questacon (Australia National Science and Technology Center)      

                                                                                by Erica Jolly

     It looks like magic --
     children are turning
     a great stone sphere
     this way and that
     smoothly, easily.  

JMM Seattle, 1-7-16 -- Poetry+Math+Art

 Read your mathy poems in Seattle!

An invitation to participate -- in January!  Read on!

 ANNOUNCING Poetry + Art + Math

 January 7, 2016, Thursday, 5:30 pm–7:00 pm.

Room 608, Washington State Convention Center, Seattle 

     At the Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM) organized by Gizem Karaali, Pomona College; 

Lawrence M. Lesser, University of Texas at El Paso; and Douglas Norton, Villanova University. 

Celebrating waves of light . . .

     On October 8, Scotland's celebration of National Poetry Day had the theme "Light."  An online collection of themed poems suitable for children is available here.  From my Romanian friend, Doru Radu, who attended that celebration, I received poem-cards from the event. One of the cards contained a poem by filmmaker and poet Margaret Tait (1918-1999). I include that poem with its accompanying image below.  

Use a phone App to find mathy poems

A day late, Happy Birthday, E. E. Cummings 

(b 14 October 1894, d 3 September 1962).

     One of my favorite poetry sites is PoetryFoundation.org -- publisher of POETRY Magazine and supplier of a wonderful phone app (also entitled POETRY).  The app offers access to an enormous data-base of poems, sorted into categories that may be accessed using a SPIN feature, activated by touch.  Spinning the upper layer of categories can lead to "Humor" or "Joy" or "Insecurity" or  . . ..  Spinning the lower layer of categories can lead to "& Life" or  "& Nature" or . . . . When my spin picked the match of "Humor" and "& Arts and Sciences" I found a list of 263 poems.  One was Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky."  I also found the tiny poem "Nothing"  by Ken Mikolowski that plays with meaning as mathematicians also love to do. 

Daughter and Father - a warm geometry . . .

     Kate Stange is a mathematician -- from the Canadian province of Ontario and now at the University of Colorado -- whose father, Ken Stange, is a visual artist and poet. I met them on the internet via our combined interests in the intersections of poetry and mathematics. Lots of years ago, Kate gathered an online anthology of mathy poems. One of her recent online ventures is the development of WIN -- Women in Number Theory.  Below I offer one of Ken Stange's poems, taken from his collection Advice to Travellers (Penumbra, 1994).

Don't Mistake Your Mirror for a Window on the World     by Ken Stange

A reflection is both a thought about the world and the image we see in the mirror. -- Hippokrites

Consider your daughter's first smile.   
.    

Toward Infinity . . .

     During summer teaching opportunities a dozen or more years ago in Deva, Romania I met Doru Radu who taught English there -- and our mutual love of poetry led us to collaborate on English translations of work by Romanian poets George Bacovia and Ileana Malancioiu.  Now Doru is in Poland and he is translating Polish poetry into Romanian.  One of his favorite poets is Ewa Lipska -- a poet I have met via Poetry International.  Below is her poem "Newton's Orange:  Infinity" -- found at Poetry International together with the original Polish poem.
     As I have noted before, "infinity" is a term whose varied uses fascinate me.  Sometimes I wonder how much of my "mathematical" understanding of the concept I might some day incorporate into a poem.

     Newton's Orange:  Infinity     by  Ewa Lipska   

A mathematician's favorite poet

     A summertime gift book that I have much enjoyed reading is Love & Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality by Edward Frenkel (Basic Books, 2013).  I admire the way Frenkel's memoir braids mathematics together with the other threads of his life.  Including poetry.  Like me, he chooses E E Cummings as one of his favorite poets.  And he used lines from Cummings' 1931 poem "the surely" as an epigram for a 2007 book that summarized his work.
     Below I include the entire text of Cummings' poem, with Frenkel's epigraph highlighted in bold face.

the surely     

Cued
motif smites truly to Beautifully
retire through its english

the Forwardflung backwardSpinning hoop returns fasterishly

A subtraction problem

Let's solve this subtraction problem:

                    Women do the job
            minus   the recognition.    
                           ____________________________

      The "found poem" above is from a headline for an article by Petula Dvorak in the Washington Post on 21 August 2015.  Dvorak's full headline was a bit longer, "Women do the job minus the training and recognition."  (Indeed Dvorak's article portrays the military as an even more difficult environment for women than the STEM fields.)
       Also found in the Post (this past weekend) an enthusiastic review by Marcia Bartusiak of Eileen Pollack's The Only Woman In the Room:  Why Science Is Still a Boys' Club.  Another problem to solve!!!

C K Williams -- Three Mile Island

A poet whose work I have long enjoyed, C K Williams  (1936-1915), died a few days ago.  (You may find a generous sample of his poems online -- for example at PoetryFoundation.org and Poets.org.)  Williams is a poet whose writing does not tend toward mathematics but his very fine poem "Tar" (about the Three Mile Island nuclear plant crisis of 1979, a year when I lived in Pennsylvania not far away) has a few numbers.  I present below the first stanza of  "Tar" and, beneath it, a link to the rest of the poem.

from   Tar        by C. K. Williams

The first morning of Three Mile Island: those first disquieting, 
       uncertain, mystifying hours.    

Choosing what words mean . . .

     Nineteenth century writer and mathematician Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) gave his character, Humpty Dumpty, these words:  "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."  And so it is in mathematics -- where, for example, the term "rational" (used in the poem"The Disposition of Art," shown below) has a precise meaning that differs from its typical conversational usage.
     The photo below shows computer-generated art by Silver Spring artist Allen Hirsh -- and, beside it, a framed version of the poem mentioned above.  Our work was exhibited together at last summer's BRIDGES and MAA conferences.  A clearer presentation of Hirsh's art -- "An Outgrabed Mome Rath" -- is available here.  My poem is presented below, beneath the photo.  

Words of Ada Lovelace

These poetic words of Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) -- concerning translation of mathematical principles into practical forms -- I found here:

Those who view mathematical science,
not merely as a vast body
of abstract and immutable truths,
whose intrinsic beauty, symmetry and logical completeness,
when regarded in their connexion together as a whole,
entitle them to a prominent place 
in the interest of all profound and logical minds,  

Shaping sentences with Fibonacci numbers . . .

Counting words . . ..  

     1                One
     1               person
     2               with courage
     3               makes a majority.               Andrew Jackson (updated)

Counting syllables . . .

     1               Life
     1               is
     2               painting
     3               a picture
     5               not doing a sum.                    Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Songs of mathematics . . .

     Larry Lesser is a songwriter who uses lyrics for teaching as well as entertainment.  A varied sample of his creations for doing this are presented in his article "Mathematical lyrics;  noteworthy endeavours in education" found in the "Poetry and Mathematics / Special Issue" of the Journal of Mathematics and the Arts, March-June 2014).
     One of the article's enchanting items is a song for children -- "Circle Song" -- which Lesser has written to the familiar tune of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star"; this lyric offers a way to remember critical formulas for a circle.

Circle Song     by Lawrence Mark Lesser

Take your finger 'round the jar:
Circumf'rence equals 2πr!  

It starts with counting . . .

Mathematical imagery is one of the many features I enjoy in the work of Canadian environmental scientist and poet Madhur Anand.  Here is a sample from her new collection (A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes).
 

Background:  In an experiment designed to test the truth of a given statement 

(often called the null hypothesis), a Type I error occurs if the experiment results in a true hypothesis 
being rejected (a "false positive") and a Type II error occurs if a false hypothesis is accepted. 

Type One Error     by Madhur Anand

I avoid news, talk to strangers, walk around the block
a thousand times and toss nickels for random samples.
I still get a few false positives.  I'm fine.  It's good. 

Mathematical Modeling

My friend and colleague, University of Connecticut mathematician Sarah Glaz, is an accomplished poet and is active in coordinating math-poetry activities -- via her website, the annual BRIDGES Conference, the anthology Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics . . . .  Here is one of her mathy poems -- this one a pantoum, first published in London Grip.

Mathematical Modelling     by Sarah Glaz

Mathematical modelling may be viewed
As an organizing principle
That enables us to handle
A vast array of information