Speed flunking math . . . NO, NO!

     Found online . . . "Scab Maids on Speed" . . . reminding me once again the being bad at math continues to be a more popular position (especially for girls) than being good at it.  Here is the opening stanza of the poem by Maggie Estep (1963-2014), a leading lady of slam poetry -- and found at PoetrySoup.

     Scab Maids On Speed      by Maggie Estep

      My first job was when I was about 15.
      I had met
     a girl named Hope who became my best friend.
      Hope and I were flunking math
     class so we became speed freaks.
      This honed our algebra skills and we quickly
     became whiz kids.
      For about 5 minutes.
      Then, our brains started to fry
     and we were just teenage speed freaks.

     Then, we decided to to seek gainful employment. . . .

Not poetry, but one of the websites I enjoy is The Math Comic Strips -- a site I first discovered  a few months ago via this "Frank and Ernest" strip about making a difference.  Enjoy!

Quantum Lyrics -- Poems

     Quantum Lyrics (W.W.Norton, 2009) is the title of a poetry collection by A. Van Jordan in which the poet celebrates scientists -- including Feynman and Einstein -- and makes vivid use of mathematical and scientific terminology in his poems; here are samples from that collection:

from Richard P. Feynman Lecture:  Broken Symmetries

by A. Van Jordan

Symmetry walks between two worlds.  To the hands it tries to touch us from either side; to the feet it simply wants us not to stumble but to saunter. ...  We believe that love is equal to hate but nothing is perfectly symmetric. ...  Why, for example, does the earth orbit elliptically, as if these old hands had drawn the path, instead of following an elegant circle?   

What can be proven . . .

     Two weeks ago poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019) died and her passing has caused me to turn again to her work. In "I Looked Up" -- from her 1994 collection, White Pine -- I have found and am reflecting on this line.

     What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven.

Mathy Limericks

     Many mathy poets enjoy the challenge of satisfying (or almost-satisfying) the prescribed rhythm and rhyme schemes for the five-line poem-form called a limerick.  Below are five limerick-creations from Kate Jones, poet and part of Kadon Enterprises, creator of a host of mathematical game puzzles. (AND this link leads to several earlier postings in this blog that also present verses in limerick form.)

     Limericks     by Kate Jones

     There once was an artist supreme
     Whose geometry had a rare scheme.
          Tessellations and creatures
          And impossible features. . .
     MC Escher created an infinite dream.   

2019 AMS Prize-Winning Math Poems

     Last fall the American Mathematical Society held a math-poetry contest for Maryland students and the winners were announced and celebrated in Baltimore last Saturday.  Two of the winners, Tina Xia and Brooke Johnston, have given me permission to offer their poems here!

Math is Me     by Brooke Johnston, Notre Dame Preparatory School

          Math can inspire.
          Math can inquire.
          Math does not require those who know
          but those who understand.
          Math is me.

A Love Letter to My X     by Tina Xia, Walt Whitman High School

To wonder is to dream, said one of the greats--
To meddle is to be irrational.  Love, like
Many things, is fickle and feckless. Ask mother:
She would agree.  And people will tell you to find
X until you die, but man, you need to move on.
I believe in the power of both math and love,     

A Multi-Author Poem Celebrating Math-People

     At the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Baltimore last Friday evening, the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics (JHM) and SIGMAA-ARTS sponsored a poetry reading.  

Moderated  by Gizem Karaali, the pre-reregistered participants included

 Lawrence M. Lesser, Sarah Glaz, Ben Orlin, Rachel Levy, Luise Kappe,

Brooke C. Johnston, Douglas Norton, Claudia Gary, JoAnne Growney

In addition to poems by participants registered in advance, the event included a "crowd-sourced" poem.  Each person attending was invited to submit two lines of poetry about math-people -- and the pairs of lines were put together into a poem that I offer below.  MANY THANKS to these participants who gave us lines.

Order of contributors (2 lines each): David Reimann, Maru Colbert, Greg Coxson,

 David Flesner, Nancy Johnston, Kate Jones, Hunter Johnston, Debra Bordeau (4 lines), 

Luise Kappe (in German—with translation at end), Margaret Kepner, Thomas Atkinson,  

Brooke Johnston, Andrew Johnston, Ximena Catpillan, Bronna Butler, Courtney Hauf,

 JoAnne Growney, Doug Norton, Sean Owen, Eric Marland

Sending THANK-YOU to all of the authors, 

               I present below our poem, "We Love Mathematics."

We Love Mathematics

Mathematicians are meeting today—
ideas unfold in space, time, and hearts. 
   Math is the language of everyone
   Any part of everything began as a sum.   

"Math and Self" -- a visual poem

     One of the great pleasures of attending mathematics meetings in Baltimore last week was meeting old friends.  One of these, Gabriel Prajitura, a mathematician at SUNY Brockport, is also a poet and a person with whom I have worked on translation of poetry by Romanian poet Nichita Stanescu.  Gabi has shared with me "Math and Self," one of his visual poems: 
.

"Math and Self" by Gabriel Prajitura

Here is a link to several earlier postings in this blog featuring translations by Gabi and me of mathy poetry by Nichita Stanescu.

A poetry equation . . . .

     My recent attendance (January 16-19) at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Baltimore has resulted in a pile of math-poetry items to sort and organize for offering here in my blog.  While that sorting happens, here is an idea to ponder -- found in a recent article about Brooklyn-based poet and teacher Taylor Mali -- this thoughtful quote:

"... a metaphor is an equation between two words.”

A Perfect Number

     One of the things I love to find in a poem is the surprise of a double meaning -- especially involving a mathematical term such as "group" or "zero" or "identity."  The following poem of mine aims to offer that surprise -- as it celebrates actor-inventor Hedy Lamarr while playing with the meanings of "perfect."

Looking for Mathematics in Hedy Lamarr   by JoAnne Growney

All my six husbands married me for different reasons.

                               ---Hedy Lamarr

Perhaps Hedy Lamarr married so often because six

is a perfect number – the sum of all its proper

divisors, “proper” meaning “less than six,”

“divisor” meaning “a counting number

that divides and leaves

no remainder.”

After a perfect number of husbands, there is no

remainder. Six is the smallest perfect

number, the next is twenty-eight.

And twenty-eight

is too many

husbands.

Today I head to the 2019 Joint Mathematics Meetings in Baltimore

including a Poetry Reading Friday, January 18, 7 PM

 -- hope to see you there!

Poems that Celebrate Mathematicians

     Recently I received from John Golden (blogger at mathhombre.blogspot.com and math professor at Michigan's Grand Valley State University,  this link to a collection of poems developed by students Ellen Audia and Connor Dudas as their senior project for degrees in Mathematics from Grand Valley State University.   On page 6, we have their poem about Archimedes:

Archimedes

Everyone knows

The great Archimedes

One of the leading scientists

Of the classical antiquity

The area of a circle

Equals pi r squared

Archimedes also discovered

The volume of a sphere  

Mathematical motherhood -- keeping count

     The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, with new issues coming twice a year, late in January and July, is a wonderful resource.  Their latest issue (July 2018) was themed "Mathematics and Motherhood" and is an example of their wonderful support for expanding our images of mathematicians to recognize the vital contributions of women.
     From that issue, here are opening stanzas of  a poem by Nevada scientist and mathematician Marylesa Howard -- lines that offer a mathematical description of the constant adjustments of parenthood.   Several decades ago, when I was a math professor and parent of young children, I needed to keep details of parenting away from my profession -- a divided life.  I'm glad things are different now.

A poem . . . like a mathematical proof . . .

     Mathematician-Poet Sarah Glaz has been active in bringing poetry events to the annual summer Math-Arts conference Bridges -- and she has given me permission to include this poem which appears in the Bridges 2018 Poetry Anthology and in her wonderful recent collection Ode to Numbers  (Antrim House, 2017). 

      Like a Mathematical Proof     by Sarah Glaz

       A poem courses through me
       like a mathematical proof,
       arriving whole from nowhere,
       from a distant galaxy of thought.  

Celebrate a Science Woman -- and offer friendship!

      Last weekend's Washington Post used the headline 

  Astronomer celebrated as the 'mother' of the Hubble Space Telescope  

for the obituary of Nancy Grace Roman.  It opens with this sentence:

               When Nancy Grace Roman requested permission
               to take a second algebra course in high school,
               the teacher demanded to know, "what lady
               would take mathematics instead of Latin?"

But Roman persisted in the challenging studies and was not dissuaded by biases.  The obituary quotes an interview from Science magazine in which she said:   

Celebrating winter with a Fibonacci poem

  Another year ends . . . may 2019 bring good numbers for us all!  

     Exercise -- especially jogging -- helps to channel my restless energy and allow me to be productive.  Here is a poem of jogging and the Fibonacci numbers.

Counting on a December morning     by JoAnne Growney

one chickadee, one squirrel
my own two feet left-right left-right on the soft track
around the soccer field three blocks from my home
sparkling bright against grey sky five crows alight
in the lacy spread of fractal branches of eight bare locust trees

when I am early morning’s first human to arrive at Shepherd Park
when I am first and the wind is gentle and the temperature
is not bitter cold
dozens of robins hop and flutter near me
as I plod some thirteen laps

smiling, maybe losing count
and loving my Fibonacci world

Thanks to mathematician-poet Sarah Glaz who has included this poem 

in the Bridges Stockholm 2018 Poetry Anthology.

The square root of tomorrow . . .

     The surprise of a mathy poem came into my email-box at 6 AM this morning, delivered as "Poem-of-the-Day" from the wonderful website, poets.org.  The complete title of this poem by California poet giovanni singleton is "last cucumber from the garden (in conversation w/ julie ezelle patton)" and in a "More" link beside the posting of the poem, the author explains how the title relates to the mathy poem that moves from groundedness to ecstasy.   Below are the opening lines . .. go here for the rest.
  

From " last cucumber from the garden . . . "

Also at poets.org, lots of other poems with links to mathematics.

A Syllable-Snowball of Holiday Wishesl

 o 

 This 

 Christmas 

 let us strive 

  to    multiply  

 our understanding 

 of different neighbors -- 

 each day add deeds of kindness, 

 subtract  some  carbon  emissions, 

 integrate our commitments with love. 

     

For more about  snowball-poems, visit this prior blog-posting.  For lots of background about poetry-constraints and the organization (OULIPO) that has popularized them, here is a link to Wikipedia's summary.

Examining boundaries for Math-Women

Mathematician Ursula Whitcher is a versatile and interesting person -- and currently an editor for the American Mathematical Society's Mathematical Reviews.  It was my pleasure to meet and work with her at a conference on "Creative Writing in Mathematics . . ." in Banff in 2016.  Like me, Whitcher writes some poetry -- and here is one of her poems -- this one recognizing the isolation of math-woman Sophie Germain.

       Boundary Conditions     by Ursula Whitcher

               Royal Academy of Science, Paris, 1823

       This is her moment of triumph:
       a seat at the center, a node.
       Mademoiselle Germain sits silent,
       head upright, chaperoned.
       Academy members rise
       or dip; the speaker drones.   

Defending Poetry . . . .

With sadness I learned yesterday of the death of poet Meena Alexander (1951-2018) -- not only a fine poet but also one of my treasured teachers during my MFA studies at Hunter a bunch of years ago.  As I browsed the works of Alexander online I found here in World Literature Today her essay "What Use Is Poetry?" which includes reference to Shelley's "In Defence of Poetry." 

     Shelley's words led me to think of mathematics; perhaps you will, too:
          “It creates for us a being within our being. 
           It makes us inhabitants of a world to which 
           the familiar world is a chaos. It reproduces 
           the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, 
           and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity 
           which obscures from us the wonder of our being.”

The Heart's Arithmetic

     For me, the Christmas holiday season is a time for family gathering and a treasured time for that reason.  Today my thoughts turn to one of my favorite poems of family and mathematics -- a poem by much-too-soon-departed poet Wilmer Mills (1969-2011),  a poem first published in Poetry and also also found here at the Poetry Foundation website. 

     An Equation for My Children  by Wilmer Mills

     It may be esoteric and perverse
     That I consult Pythagoras to hear
     A music tuning in the universe.
     My interest in his math of star and sphere
     Has triggered theorems too far-fetched to solve.  

United by ice cream -- the sphere and cone

     During recent months I have been part of an online course that has helped me and a dozen others to learn steps for editing Wikipedia -- with the goal that we will be able to add biographies of "Women in Science and Mathematics" to that enormous online encyclopedia (in which, currently, less than 18% of the biographies feature women).    The course has led me to SEARCH Wikipedia using names of women I admire -- and it will be my intent to work toward addition of those missing.  One such woman -- a mathematics PhD, a talented teacher, a poet -- is Katharine O'Brien (1905-1986).  I introduce her below with one of her mathy poems (first published in The Mathematics Teacher in 1968).

     Einstein and the Ice Cream Cone       by Katharine O'Brien

     His first day at Princeton, the legend goes,
     he went for a stroll (in his rumpled clothes).
     He entered a coffee shop -- moment of doubt --
     then climbed on a stool and looked about.
     Beside him, a frosh, likewise strange and alone,
     consoling himself with an ice cream cone.

By Claude Shannon -- a Poem for Rubik's Cube

     Below I present the opening lines of an 80-line (plus footnotes) poetic creation by Claude Shannon (1916-2001).  A mathematician, engineer and cryptographer, Shannon is often called "the father of information theory."  My own acquaintance with Shannon's work came through the topic of error-correction codes.  Shannon's poem on the Rubik Cube was first published here in a Scientific American blog posting by John Horgan.

     A Rubric on Rubik Cubics (1)     by Claude Shannon
   
     Strange imports come from Hungary:
     Count Dracula, and ZsaZsa G.,
     Now Erno Rubik's Magic Cube
     For PhD or country rube.
     This fiendish clever engineer
     Entrapped the music of the sphere.   

Chaos theory -- portrayed in poetry

     A poem I have long loved is "Chaos Theory" by poet (and fiction writer and scholar) Ronald Wallace -- and he has given me permission to offer it below.

Chaos Theory     by Ronald Wallace

    1. Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions

       For want of a nail the shoe was lost,
       for want of a shoe the horse was lost,
       and so on to the ultimate loss—a battle,
       a world. In other words, the breeze
       from this butterfly's golden wings
       could fan a tsunami in Indonesia
       or send a small chill across the neck 
       of an old love about to collapse in Kansas
       in an alcoholic stupor—her last.
       Everything is connected. Blame it on
       the butterfly, if you will. Or the gesture
       thirty years ago, the glance across
       the ninth-grade auditorium floor,   

Counting words with the Fibonacci numbers . . .

Today a poem by New York poet, Larissa Shmailo,

that explores aging with word-counts that match the Fibonacci numbers.

    none

    1(one) 

    1(ego)  

    two (I)

    I 2 threeeeeeeeee

    5 school, ruled 2 three   

Marriage in Quantum Mechanics

     Sometimes mathematical concepts also bring to mind phenomena in our everyday lives -- as in this poem by New Jersey poet Charlotte Mandel;  I hope you enjoy, as I did, Mandel's play with ideas and imagery. 

     In Quantum Mechanics, Marriage Is     by Charlotte Mandel

     discontinuous
     as rain
     chips into the lake,
     each linear strike
     sets another circle in the jostle
     as currents
     succeed.   

Thankful for . ..

          Now
          I
          give thanks --
          for your grace
          and empathy, for
          mathematics and poetry.

     When I offer a poetry class to people new to writing, often the first poem I ask them to write is a Fib -- I give them a topic (such as "winter" or "Thanksgiving" or "gardening" or . . .) and ask them to write lines whose syllable-counts match the first six Fibonacci numbers: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8. Time and again these writers are pleased with the way that the numerical constraints shape their words into thoughtful meaning.
     This posting, "Poems with Fibonacci Number Patterns" offers more samples.  The six-line form (called a Fib and illustrated above) was invented in 2006 by Gregory Pincus.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Qualitative thinking in a quantitative era . . .

Chemistry Nobelist  Roald Hoffman also is a poet, 

and an advocate of holistic education.

Many thanks to Australian poet and STEAM advocate, Erica Jolly, 

for reminding me of the importance of Hoffmann's work.

HEIGHT     by Roald Hoffmann

The man
who said
when you're on top
of a mountain
you can't see it
was a miner. 

The tiny poem above is found here on Hoffmann's website.

A poet that makes math personal

     Mathematician-poet Marion Cohen has a new poetry collection just out -- The Project of Being Alive.  Here is a sample from that collection, a poem that highlights her relationship with mathematics:

      Statement     by Marion Deutsche Cohen

     A good teacher is supposed to teach students, not subjects.
     But I teach math.
     Whoever the students, math is the subject.
     If there were no students I’d probably still teach my subject.
     I’d teach and I’d learn
     all by myself.

Echoing Marion's thoughts, I think that many of us who love mathematics and/or love poetry, enjoy the challenge of reading and rereading -- and struggling to absorb difficult ideas. 

A FIRST-LOVE in math-poetry -- "Counting Rhymes"

     Still in my head are counting rhymes that I learned in childhood -- an early connection between mathematics and poetry that I think helped me to love both subjects.  Here is a link to a list of more than forty math-rhymes -- and including one that is also in Spanish.
     This rhyme is one that has been useful to me throughout both childhood and adulthood-- as I strive to remember which months have thirty days.

          Thirty days hath September,
          April, June, and November;
          All the rest have thirty-one,
          Excepting February alone,
          Which has twenty-eight in line,
          Till leap-year gives it twenty-nine.

AND, today's issue of the Washington Post has a cartoon by Tom Toles -- about recounting votes after last week's election -- that also involves a counting rhyme:  I offer part of the rhyme below but the visual is critical -- and available here.

          One, two, none for you.
          Three, four, they fell on the floor.
          Five, six, it takes some tricks . . .
          Seven, eight, to make America great.
               . . .
For a few more rhymes, check out this 2013 post, "Nursery Rhyme Mathematics."

Mathy poems at poets.org

 For a variety of mathy poems, here's a GREAT link to follow. 

Rhyming wordplay -- with math terms . . .

     Nineteenth century British poet Arthur Clement Hilton (1851-1877) died young but during his short life he wrote some lively verse.  Here is "Mathematics" -- from his collection The First Green, found here (p.134).

     Mathematics     by Arthur Clement Hilton

     I've really had enough of sums,
        I've done so very many,
     That now instead of doing sum
        I'd rather not do any.

     I've toiled until my fingers are
        With writing out of joint;
     And even now of Decimals
        I cannot see the point.  

Applied Science -- and Art

     Some days there is time to sort through piles of old stuff saved on a shelf -- and this morning's fun-find was a September 1993 issue of Poetry Magazine with this poem, "Applied Science," by Neal Bowers, a poem inspired by sculpture by George Greenamyer.

       Applied Science     by Neal Bowers
                        after George Greenamyer’s "Start to Finish"
       Because three left turns make a right,
       and the way down is the way up,
       the way in the way out,
       but most of all because
       the beginning is the end,

The Puzzle of Time

     Recently I have learned with sadness of the death last February of Romanian-Canadian mathematician Florin Diacu (1959-2018).  Florin also wrote poetry -- and helped to organize seminars in "Creative Writing in Mathematics" at the Banff International Research Station.  I met Diacu when I was privileged to attend these seminars -- and you may find my 2016 posting of his poem "Arnold Diffusion" at this link.  Today I remember him by sharing with readers his poem "Time" -- first published in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics in 2012 and also available at this link.

       Time     by Florin Diacu

       Time drifts on the sea of illusions.

       Newton’s image of it was a line,
       unbounded and straight, like desire.
       Einstein called it dimension four:
       the lasting partner of space.

Five Little Pumpkins

 

Happy Halloween!

This children's rhyme is found at the DeepLearningToolKits(DLTK) website) and available at that site also with downloadable illustrations.  Enjoy!

Five Little Pumpkins

Five little pumpkins sitting on a gate.

The Prince of Algebra . . . and SAT scores

     An article in a recent issue of the Washington Post (perhaps this link will get you to it) told of a drop in SAT scores for the Class of 2018 -- and it has got me to thinking about various approaches to teaching and learning and about what test scores measure. Once -- a dozen or so years ago -- I got roped into helping with an SAT-prep course and was astounded to learn how much improvement was predicted for strategies relating to when to guess, when to give no answer, and so on.
     As I parented children moving through school, it seemed to me that one of the best features in their educational years was variety in their teachers.  We want -- in our math classes and throughout our schools -- to educate people who can keep on learning and who can respond to unexpected situations.  Multiple choice questions on SAT tests represent only one aspect of that variety.
     Teachers meet a variety of students -- and none of us are perfectly suited for them all.  One of the interesting students to whom I tried to be helpful speaks in the following poem, "The Prince of Algebra," also previously posted in this blog on January 10, 2014.

 The Prince of Algebra      by JoAnne Growney

       Madam Professor,
       let me introduce myself.
       I'm Albert James,
       whom you may know
       by my test score
       that's lower than my age.

Enter by Nov 9 -- Student Math-Poetry Contest

Contest sponsored by the American Mathematical Society

 for 

 junior-high students . . .  . senior-high students . . . college students 

 from Maryland 

WRITE A  POEM  with connections to  MATH  -- Send it to AMS

Here's a link to contest information:  www.ams.org/math-poetry  

This blog's posting for October 10 also gives some information about the student contest.

Describing a scene with numbers

     Lana Hechtman Ayers is a versatile and accomplished poet who also has a degree in mathematics --  in her poem below, she paints a picture with numbers.

       Algebra     by Lana Hechtman Ayers

       4 women
       of 3 generations
       are walking along
       2nd Street together
       in the rain
       without any number
       of umbrellas.

Read your Math-Poetry in Baltimore, 1/18/19

You are invited be part of a reading of math-linked poetry 

sponsored by the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics  and  SIGMAA-ARTS

at the 2019 Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM)

Baltimore Convention Center  Room 301  

Friday, January 18, 2019  7 - 8:30 PM

 Celebrate MATH PEOPLE with poems! 

All interested in mathematical poetry/art are welcome.  Come to share your poems about famous or not-famous math personalities (the researcher, the teacher, the geek, the reluctant student, or whomever) – or join us simply to enjoy hearing the work of others!   Though we do not discourage last-minute decisions to participate, we encourage poets to 
          submit poetry (up to 3 poems, reading time up to 5 minutes) 
                    and a 40-word bio         in advance  (by early November)
so you can be listed in our printed program. Early submissions are encouraged, by November 1 would be GREAT -- but submissions will be considered into mid or late November.    Send submissions (and inquiries) to Gizem Karaali (gizem.karaali AT pomona.edu). Organizers of the event include JoAnne Growney, Gizem Karaali, Lawrence M. Lesser, and Douglas Norton.

Math-themed -- and seasonal -- Haiku

      Artist and computer scientist Stephen Luecking, now retired from teaching at DePaul University, has sent me some of his Haiku with mathematical imagery; enjoy!

fractals vein the leaves  

swirling in random descent  

autumn winds howling    

crystal hexagons  

drifting from darkening clouds  

earth sleeps in white gown  

Can numbers be a bridge to understanding. . . ?

Fifty-Fifty     by Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)

       What is there for us two
       to split fifty-fifty,
       to go halvers on?
            A Bible, a deck of cards?
            a farm, a frying pan?
            a porch, front steps to sit on?
       How can we be pals
            when you speak English
            and I speak English
            and you never understand me
            and I never understand you?

This poem is on my shelf in Sandburg's collection, Honey and Salt (Harcourt, Brace; 1963).

The music of twelve tones -- in poems

     Inspired by the musical composition strategy twelve-tone technique -- devised by Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg (1974-1951), in which all 12 notes of the chromatic scale are sound as often as one another in a piece of music -- American poet Elizabeth Bartlett (1911-1994) has developed the twelve-tone poem.  In Bartlett's words:
       The poem consists of 12 lines, divided into couplets. 
       Each couplet contains 12 syllables, using the natural cadence of speech. 
       The accented sounds of the words are considered tones. 
       Only 12 tones are used throughout the poem, repeated various times. 
       As a result, the poem achieves a rare harmony that is purely lyrical, 
                    enriching its imagery and meaning

The following poem is on my shelf in Memory Is No Stranger (Ohio Univ. Press, 1981), a collection of Bartlett's twelve-tone poems; it also is found in the math-poetry anthology Against Infinity (Primary Press, 1979).

       The Infinite Present   by Elizabeth Bartlett

       Because I longed
       to comprehend the infinite  

Math-Poetry Contest for Maryland Students

Submission deadline:  November 9, 2018
Winners Announced:  December 12, 2018

Winning Poems Presented:  January 19, 2019

     The American Mathematical Society is conducting a math poetry contest for Maryland students–middle school, high school, and undergraduate students -- as part of the 2019 Joint Mathematics Meetings in Baltimore (Jan. 16-19, Baltimore Convention Center).   The contest is free to enter; information is at this link.  Winning poems will be printed on posters and poets will read them at the meeting as part of Mathemati-Con, a math festival for students.

          Write
          a
          thoughtful
          poem that
          shows ways math is most
          amazing -- a subject we love!

The stanza above is a Fib -- whose lines have syllables counted by the first six Fibonacci numbers.

A special Fibonacci poem

     A recent email from Marian Christie -- a nominally retired mathematics teacher from Aberdeenshire  -- alerted me to her very special sort of Fibonacci poem, one in which the number of letters-per-line follows the Fibonacci numbers AND the length of each word is a Fibonacci number AND the poem speaks about the objects counted by these Fibonacci numbers.

Pathways      by Marian Christie
–
O
I
am
not
going
anywhere
unaccompanied
by life’s patterns: a whorl
in a pinecone, branches on oak or elm trees, 
the petal count of a daisy, the helix at the heart of a chrysanthemum,
the shell of a nautilus swimming in the ocean. A sequence hides in the shape of
                                                                             probabilities, and in my own DNA. 

Poet's Note: In this poem the number of letters per line is determined by the Fibonacci sequence: the first line has zero letters while the last line, representing the twelfth number in the sequence, contains 89 letters. In addition, the letters of each word add up to a Fibonacci number.  

Christie's poem was first published on the UK-based website IndependentVariable.

Line and design -- poetry by Adrienne Rich

     A poem I first read during my high school years -- and have loved ever since -- is "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers" by Adrienne Rich (1929-2012).  Found along with that poem in Collected Early Poems 1950-1970  (W W Norton, 1994) is another poem by Rich that I also like a lot -- and offer below -- this one containing a bit of mathematics and a lot to reflect on . . .

          Boundary     by Adrienne Rich

          What has happened here will do
          To bite the living world in two,
          Half for me and half for you.
          Here at last I fix a line
          Severing the world’s design
          Too small to hold both yours and mine.
          There’s enormity in a hair
          Enough to lead men not to share
          Narrow confines of a sphere
          But put an ocean or a fence
          Between two opposite intents.
          A hair would span the difference.

The equal sign--and poetry--from Robert Recorde

  A poetic introduction of the equal sign (by Robert Recorde): 

This image is an excerpt from Recorde's The Whetstone of Witte (1557)

    Robert Recorde was born in Wales around 1510-12; he taught mathematics at both Oxford and Cambridge and got his MD from Cambridge in 1545 -- and became a physician to royalty.  He published a number of mathematical works -- one of the best known being The Whetstone of Witte (1557) -- a photographic copy of several of its pages is available here. He is lauded for the invention of the equal sign, first appearing, as shown above, in The Whetstone of Witte.  -- This article from 2015 in WalesOnline cites Recorde's greatest achievement to be making mathematics accessible to a general reader.