World Poetry Day -- Celebrate favorites!

     Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
     Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind; 

     Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.

     I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

                      From "Dirge without Music" by Edna St Vincent Millay; offered by Hermann Weyl

                      in a Memorial Address for Amalie "Emmy" Noether on April 26, 1935 at Bryn Mawr College.

Poems that Count

On January 6 of this year I attended a wonderful poetry reading (sponsored by The Word Works) that featured the work of poets Tera Ragan and James Ragan (Tera's father). Their poetry is rich in imagery of their birthplaces -- near Pittsburgh -- and Czechoslovakia (where James' parents were born and a place they visited often).  Please enjoy these lovely and varied poems that include a few well-chosen numbers:   "Alcove" by Tera Vale Ragan; "Beckett Had Only One Student" and "The Eskimo's Twelve Expressions of White" by James Ragan.
                                                               
       Alcove     by Tera Vale Ragan

       Brick upon stone, a growing
                                        foundation,
       he builds a new family home up
       from the ground
                                        cement and marble
       tile to ceiling
       beam and red oak
                                        he paid for with cash.

A poem is an equation?

     Exiled Romanian poet Nina Cassian (1924-2014) spoke with a daring and imaginative voice that I have much admired.  And she occasionally used mathematical imagery in her work -- as in the following poem:

Controversy   by Nina Cassian
                                          (translated from Romanian by William Jay Smith)
I wrote a poem, an oblique poem,
a kind of calligram, I mean.
Someone said it was an equation
being solved behind a screen. 

Celebrate Math Women

     March is Women's History Month and, although this year's theme focuses on women in public service and government, my own thoughts tend toward women in mathematics.  My post on July 21, 2015 focuses on math women -- and a google search of the blog using "math women" will lead to a host of additional poems and links.  Enjoy!
     To celebrate math-women one must first be able to name them; here is a link to an important and relevant article by Judy Green, "How Many Women Mathematicians Can You Name?"

I am the girl voice,

Drafts scribed--thoughts stretched, smoothed, squared, sighed --

Catch here now my I.

    

Inspired by Pi

     Last year, a few days after Pi-Day, my email had a link (Thanks, Paul Geiger!) to an example of Pilish -- this one a circle poem by Mike Keith that represents the initial 402 digits of Pi  -- and I have, at last, posted the poem below.  Keith's poem first appeared in the The Mathematical Intelligencer in 1986. 

     And here is a link to musical Pi --at the webpage of "The Derivatives" are math parodies written and performed by Bloomsburg University professors William Calhoun, Kevin Ferland, and Erik Wynters, including The Pi  Song (also known as 3.14159/Circle).

Arnold diffusion (and poets of Romania)

     I have had the good fortune to attend two BIRS Math / Creative Writing workshops in Banff (most recently in January 2016) and one of the organizers of these workshops has been Florin Diacu, a Romanian-Canadian mathematician-poet at Canada's University of Victoria. (For a bit more about my interest in Romanian poets, you may visit this posting from 2012 ; for still more, use "Romania" as a blog-search term.)
     Recently I discovered the following poem by Florin in the January 2014 issue of the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics and that online journal's open-access policy permits me to offer it here.  I have wondered whether it is prudent of me to present a poem about Arnold diffusion, a topic about which I have scant mathematical background.  But I like it, even though my understanding is incomplete; I hope you like it too.

The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance

     Audre Lorde (1934-1992)  is one of my favorite poets; links to my previous postings of her work in this blog are given below.  Here is the opening poem from one of Lorde's collections, The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance.

     Smelling the Wind       by Audre Lorde

     Rushing headlong
     into new silence
     your face
     dips on my horizon
     the name
     of a cherished dream  

Links to Favorites

     According to Google, these posts are the top ten favorites of visitors to this blog in the six years since my first posting in March, 2010.  Perhaps you will want to visit one of them.  Or use the SEARCH box to find something favorite of your own.   I invite your comments.  Which posts do you especially like?

Varieties of triangles -- by Guillevic     Oct 13, 2010

     Loving a mathematician (Valentine's Day and .. .)     Feb 12, 2011  

          Rhymes help to remember the digits of Pi     Sep 2, 2010

               "Mathematical" Limericks     Mar 29, 2010

                     Ray Bobo's mathematical poem Jul 14, 2010 
Poems of set paradox and spatial dimension   Feb 22, 2011
     Poems of Calculus   Apr 23, 2010

          Primes and a paradox   Aug 14, 2015
               Theorem-proof / Cut-up / poems   Nov 11, 2010
                     A Fractal Poem   Dec 28, 2014 

Newton, Einstein, Gravity, Poetry

     Recent discovery of gravitational waves has put Einstein (1878-1955) -- and even Newton (1643-1727) -- into recent news, and a visit to one of my favorite reference collections, James R. Newman's four-volume collection, The World of Mathematics, finds those two giants celebrated in verse:

Introductory quotes for Section 21 ("The New Law of Gravitation and the Old Law" by Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington) of Part V (on page 1073 of Volume Two) of James R. Newman's The World of Mathematics.

     Here are links to information about the poets named above:  Lord Byron (1788-1824),  Alexander Pope (1688-1744), and Sir John Collings Squire (1884-1958) -- and these links lead to previous blog postings that feature The World of Mathematics:  March 22, 2011 and August 2, 2011.

Euler formula poem

     Sometimes I try to write a poem that explains a mathematical concept -- it's a difficult task  My effort usually results in something that sounds more like a textbook paragraph than a poem.  And I was thereby hugely delighted (following a lead from Colm Mulcahy) to discover this poem by Grant Sanderson that has fun with a famous mathematical formula due to Euler:

e^iπ + 1 = 0     or, stated differently      e^iπ = -1

Euler Formula    by Grant Sanderson 

Famously
start with e,
raise to π
with an i,
we've been taught
by a lot
that you've got
minus one.

How Old Is the Rose-Red City?

     Most of Martin Gardner's fans are avid puzzler's -- my connection with him is also one of admiration (he was a thoughtful person who was a master at making connections among disparate things) but we are connected via poetry, including topics such as counting all possible rhyme schemes for a given stanza and the constraint-based poetry of OULIPO . . ..
     Gardner (1914-2010) was not a poet -- although he penned a quatrain or two, his great contribution was collecting and publicizing parodies and puzzle-verses by others.  Here is a link to Gardner's collection of poetic parodies, and here is a link to many of Gardner's puzzles, including the stanza below, "How Old is the Rose-Red City?" 

Visit JHM for Mathy Poems

     Today I'd like to direct you to the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, an online open-access journal that features poetry in each issue.  The Table of Contents for the first issue of 2016 is now available here -- and I offer below a poem from Issue 1 of 2015.  (Before sharing the poem "Prisoner's Dilemma" by Raymond Greenwell I want also to mention that JHM is looking for investigative journalists and that today's "Poem of the Day" at Poets.org is "Evolution" by Linda Bierds and inspired by the work of Alan Turing.)
     I am particularly intrigued by Greenwell's poem because the Prisoner's Dilemma is a decision model close to my concerns about the environment. (More comments below.)

       Prisoner's Dilemma     by Raymond N. Greenwell

       Your best choice is my demise.
       My wise choice is your defeat.    

Using a Fano plane to create a poem

     South Dakota mathematician Daniel May enjoys finding connections between his discipline and other arts -- and herein we consider a constraint-structure for poetry that he has developed using a Fano plane.  In brief, a Fano plane (shown in the diagram below) consists of 7 points and 7 lines (the three sides of the triangle, the three altitudes of the triangle, and the circle) -- with each line containing 3 of the points. 

Fano Plane Diagram

May creates a poem by associating a word with each point of the Fano plane and then creates a three-line stanza for each line of the diagram.  Here is a template for the poem "adore" -- and the poem itself is offered below the diagram: 

Visiting the Australian Poetry Library

     An Australian poet (Erica Jolly) whom I have met through this blog has helped me to learn about the great variety of poetry and related activities that are available on her continent  -- and today I want to link you to the Australian Poetry Library and to offer a mathy poem by Peter Goldsworthy that I enjoyed there.

     1     by Peter Goldsworthy 

       Arithmetic divides 
       and rules the world,
       freezing the flow
       in single frames,
       colourising each
       by numbers.

A sonnet for Napoleon's Theorem

     In geometry, Napoleon's theorem (often attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, 1769–1821) states that if equilateral triangles are constructed on the sides of any triangle, either all outward or all inward, the centers of those equilateral triangles themselves are the vertices of an equilateral triangle.  In a 2015 lecture at the  University of Maryland,  mathematician Douglas Hofstadter (perhaps best known for Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid -- Basic Books, 1970) presented Napoleon’s theorem by means of a sonnet.  Perhaps you will want to have pencil and paper available to draw as you read:

Napoleon's Theorem     by Douglas Hofstadter

Equilateral triangles three we’ll erect
Facing out on the sides of our friend ABC.
We’ll link up their centers, and when we inspect
These segments, we find tripartite symmetry.

Rabbis should learn to solve quadratics

     Thanks to mathemagician Colm Mulcahy who connected me with poet Lisa Dordal -- and thanks to her for permission to offer these lines, entertainingly seasoned with math words:

Why Rabbis Need to Know
How to Solve Quadratic Equations  

                                         by Lisa Dordal (with help from Laurie Samuels)

Because they are good exercise
for your logic muscles, which you’ll need
to work through those pesky J says-P says conflicts of text –- 
the bumpy remains of a Torah affair.