In the 1970's I had access to birth control and was fortunate to be able to be involved with adoption of children rather than abortion. And I am saddened when a child is born into a world that has no plan of care for her or him. Recent attempts to forbid abortion give me grave concerns -- concerns shared long ago in poems, using syllable-count patterns to control my ranting. Here is one of these poems (also posted earlier in this blog).
On the opening pages of a Springer Reference, Handbook of the Mathematics of the Arts and Sciences, we find a list of 107 fascinating titles -- including two that link mathematics and poetry:
"Mathematics and Poetry -- Arts of the Heart" by Gizem Karaali and Lawrence M. Lesser
"Poems Structured by Mathematics" by Daniel May
Even for those of us who lack access to the Springer volume, the abstracts found at the links above offer lots of valuable references -- and contact information for the authors.
AND, if you are on Twitter, you can enjoy palindromes and other constrained verse by Anthony Etherin ( @Anthony_Etherin ) -- an author whose latest book has the title SLATE PETALS.
One of my daily emails is poem-a-day from poets.org -- and yesterday's poem surprised me with the word "mathematics" appearing 4 times in its 28 lines. Here are several lines:
from Hunter heart a lonely is the by Kyle Dacuyan
child in a novel that has neither person nor a substance
music mathematics is a dream makes me see myself
more loving when I listen makes my heart go
the hunter and a lonely Remembering is a mathematics
and the body in its illnesses the stamina has symphonic
calculus of living in a sickness I can listen now
. . .
Dacuyan's complete poem -- for reading aloud and contemplation -- is available here.
Poems by visual poet Karl Kempton are always fascinating and often mathy. Here, from Kempton's collection, poems about something and nothing (Paper Press, 2015) is one of my favorites:
zero
the mirror
oblivion holds
wearing the mask
of infinity
Here is a link to Kempton's collection 3-CUBED: MATHEMATICAL POEMS 1975-2003.
And here is a link to previous presentations of Kempton's work in this blog.
Numerical patterns can help guide our minds and fingers to create poems -- and one of the patterns I like is the Fibonacci numbers -- a number sequence for which the first non-zero numbers are both 1, and each succeeding number is the sum of the two preceding numbers.
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, . . .
Formation of a six-line poem using the first 6 of these numbers as syllable-counts, gives a tiny poem that has been named a Fib.
For me, using these Fibonacci numbers -- starting small and growing -- as syllable counts offers a nice structure for developing my thoughts around a particular topic. I like it for myself (a couple examples below) and I suggest to my students when I am asking them to share their math-related viewpoints.
When When
your your
father mother
is mathy is mathy
what are the chances what are the chances
that interest is passed to you? that interest is passed to you?
These days I celebrate the fact that I have granddaughters who like math!
The BRIDGES Math-Arts organization held its 2021 conference (early in August) online -- and, although many of the meetings were available only to registrants, archives of papers are available at this link to all who are interested.
BRIDGES papers and events that link poetry and mathematics have been thoughtfully publicized by University of Connecticut emeritus professor Sarah Glaz who has created a webpage "Mathematical Poetry at Bridges" for that purpose. On that webpage are links to pages for individual Bridges conferences as far back as 2010 -- with poetry involvement in the conferences increasing in the later years. Here is a link to "Mathematical Poetry at Bridges 2021" -- a page with links to sample poems from more than 30 poets and also video readings of numerous poems. VISIT the site and savor the poems.
Below I offer one of the poems from the Bridges 2021 site. Playing with various ideas of "infinity" poet and math teacher Amy Uyematsu has created "This Thing Called Infinity" -- and she given me permission to offer it here.
This Thing Called Infinity by Amy Uyematsu
Every six months the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics offers a new online issue and includes a generous offering of mathy poems. Here is a link to the current issue (Vol, 11, No, 2, July 2021) and I offer --after a sample, which features a type of algebra problem -- the titles, authors, and links to JHM mathy poems.
Train Algebra by Mary Soon Lee
Do not use a calculator. Show your work.
Haruki leaves Chicago Union Station at 10:42 pm
on a train traveling at 60 miles per hour.
At 10:33 pm, Haruki boards the train.
He’s abandoned his job,
his collection of cactuses;
has only his cell phone, his wallet,
and a dog-eared paperback.
He walks through two carriages
before finding an open seat,
apologizes as he sits down
beside a woman his mother’s age.
The woman glares at him.
Back in 2007, 350 parts per million was the "safe upper limit" for CO2 in our atmosphere -- a figure presented by NASA scientist Jim Hansen in December 2007 and widely agreed upon. From that number the website 350.org was born. On October 24, 2009, 350 Poems celebrated an international day of climate action with a posting, from poets all around the world, of 350 poems of 3.5 lines each -- each responding to concern for man-made climate change. My own entry (#265 here in the listing) I offer below.
It's sad news that recent data (more than 400 ppm of CO2 in our atmosphere) verifies our greedy disregard of this important warning. What can we do?
The Spider (265/350) by JoAnne Growney
Spinner of intricate, twenty-inch silk food snares.
Twenty inches — not fifty or two hundred.
She knows the limits to her senses. Humans
keep building bigger webs.
This 3.5 line poem was first posted almost ten years ago (here at this link).
One of the timeless treasures on my bookshelves is a complete collection of work by Lewis Carroll
(pen name for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832-1898) -- writer, puzzler,
math guy . . . Here's a poem I found in "Answers to Knot 1" in A Tangled Tale. (The problem, Knot 1, is stated below the poem.)
from A Tangled Tale a response (by authors named below) to a puzzle posed by Lewis Carroll
The elder and the younger knight
They sallied forth at three;
How far they went on level ground
It matters not to me;
What time they reached the foot of hill,
When they began to mount,
Are problems which I hold to be
Of very small account.
Because this blog has more than a thousand posts, spread over more than eleven years of posting, finding best information can be challenging. The SEARCH feature in the right-hand column) and this linked file of names of poets and math-people and blog-content topics can be useful. And, when time permits, browsing offers lots of fun. Here, for the curious are the TOP TEN postings -- that is the postings that have had the most visitors since the blog's beginning in March, 2010.
ENJOY!
These are titles and links to the ten posts most visited in this blog since its beginning in 2010.
from September 2, 2010 Rhymes help to remember the digits of Pi
from October 13, 2010 Varieties of Triangles -- by Guillevic
from March 29, 2010 "Mathematical" Limericks
from February 11, 2011 Loving a mathematician (Valentine's Day and . . . )
from September 29, 2017 Poetry . . . Mathematics . . . and Attitude
from February 18, 2011 Srinivasa Ramanujan
from January 8, 2016 The world is round . . . or flat!
from February 22, 2011 Poems of set paradox and spatial dimension
from June 22, 2021 Interpreting Khayyam -- in Rhyme
from April 19, 2010 Poems with Fibonacci number patterns
Recently I have been revisiting the poems that Sarah Glaz and I collected for the anthology, Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics (AK Peters / CRC Press, 2008) and renewing my enjoyment of them. Here, from page 146, is a sample.
The Proof by Theodore Deppe
I could live like this, waiting on the roof
for the great egret that flies overhead
at just this time, measuring the sun's height
with my fingers to see if the moment's come,
Annie studying the horizon as she describes
the last minutes of a show she watched
in which some mathematician -
she didn't catch the name - labours seven years
to solve a proof he's been enthralled by
since childhood, and though Annie tuned in
too late to know the nature of the problem,
she loves the pure joy with which he looks
into the camera and announces, I've found it -
there are tears in his eyes - I've found it.
One of my early math-poetry connections was with applied mathematician John Lew (1934-2006) who contributed often to the Humanistic Mathematics Network Journal (predecessor of the Journal of Humanistic
Mathematics -- in which this blog finds frequent math-poetry gems.) With a doctorate in physics, Lew worked in applied mathematics for many years at the IBM Watson Research Center -- and maintained interests in literature and music, serving for a time as poetry editor of the Mensa Bulletin. His sonnet below comes from his 1996 HMNJ article, "On Mathematics in Poetry." Lew's complete article is available here.
The Comet by John Lew
Near from infinity I came
Drawn to your strong, unmoving light
By some ascendance of its flame
That charms the planets through their night.
The distance melts, my spirit thaws,
Sublimes, and in your radiance flies
Soon, by the old, unchanging laws,
An exhalation through the skies.
Sweet perihelion! May we touch,
Our auras intermingle? No,
The impulse of my flight too much,
I must again to darkness go;
While you may stand, and watch my face
Dwindle through trans-Plutonian space.
An interesting controversy arose between Lew and me -- here is a link to a letter he wrote about a math-poetry "quiz" that I developed that had appeared in the American Mathematical Monthly (quiz available here).
At the website KOMPLEXIFY! a mathematician named Travis celebrates his love of mathematics in various ways, including humor and verse. He supplies lots of limericks and parodies, including Tom Lehrer's parody of "That's Entertainment" entitled "That's Mathematics" which I offer below. (Here is a link to the rich list of Travis' poetic postings.)
That’s mathematics! by Tom Lehrer
Counting sheep
When you’re trying to sleep,
Being fair
When there’s something to share,
Being neat
When you’re folding a sheet,
That’s mathematics!
When a ball
Bounces off of a wall,
When you cook
From a recipe book,
When you know
How much money you owe,
That’s mathematics!
A couple of weeks ago I posted information about prize-winning poetry in the Writing portion of the 2021 MoMath Steven Strogatz Contest for high school students. After finding that I began to look for the results of earlier contests. Apparently 2020 was the first year of these contests and in that year, also, poems were winners -- limericks (with related drawings) by Sarah Thau. “Limericks and poetry are not a typical way to convey information about
math,” admits Thau, “but I think it makes it more palatable than
learning functions by rote. Who doesn’t love a limerick?”
From her winning collection, entitled "Little Function Limericks," here is a sample of Thau's work:
 | |||||||
| The entire collection of Thau's limericks is found here. |
Mathematicians are not always white and nerdy and male . . . but, for the others who dare to specialize in science and mathematics, there are many stereotypes that need to be busted. Written by Gioia De Cari, a former MIT student, the play "Truth Values" reveals a woman's experience as a student in a male-science environment. And the documentary film, "Picture a Scientist" describes the unequal treatment -- and payment -- of female professors.
While you are seeking ways to view Truth Values and Picture a Scientist perhaps you will want to write down some of your own views; while you are gathering your thoughts, here are three of my syllable-square stanzas about women in math to reflect on.
 |
| Syllable-square thoughts about Math Women |
Sometimes the specific nature of counting can help us, for a bit of time, to steer our thoughts for away from sadness. Here is a poem in which numbers give a grieving partner a framework through which to speak. (This selection is from The Widows' Handbook (Kent State University Press, 2014), an anthology gathered and edited by Jacqueline Lapidus and Lise Menn.)
Camp Numbers by Barbara Bald
I’ve been in these woods seven days,
fed our fish twelve shrimp pellets,
filled two hummingbird feeders with red juice,
given our cat ten doses of pink medicine.
I’ve live-trapped twenty-eight field mice
with the Tin Cat trap you bought,
rescued our Brittany’s toy four times from the river,
seen one person, the gas man fixing the fridge, in two days.
I’ve written thirteen poems,
five about your untimely death,
cleaned six cabinets to rid rodent remnants,
replaced one roll of toilet paper in the outhouse.
I am still waiting for one of you.
Learn more about poet and educator and nature-lover Barbara Bald here at her website.
BROWSE and ENJOY!
Back in January 2020 I gathered a list of titles of previous posts and posted it here at this link. And below I offer titles of postings -- with links -- since that time.
Recently I have learned -- through Mo-Math (National Museum of Mathematics) -- of the of the Steven H. Strogatz Prize -- recognizing high school students for outstanding math communication projects. Winners for the 2021 Contest were announced yesterday -- and information about upcoming contests is available here.
This year's Strogatz winner in the Writing category was a poem by Julia Schanen, entitled "Math Person." Below I offer Schanen's opening lines -- and the sample is followed by a link to the full text of her poem -- of mathematics and of the painful isolation that a 10th grade math girl often feels.
Expressing love with mathematical terminology is beautifully done in "One More Love Poem" by Dunya Mikhail -- this poem was offered by poets.org in their poem-a-day feature on April 2, 2021 and it deserves to be widely shared.
One More Love Poem by Dunya Mikhail
If I had one more day
I would write a love poem
composed of one word
repeated like binary code.
I’ll multiply it by the number
of days that passed
without saying it to you
and I’ll add the days
Eleventh century Persian scholar Omar Khayyam (1048-1131) is described by Wikipedia as a polymath -- he was a mathematician, astronomer, philosopher and poet (and the foregoing Wikipedia link summarizes his accomplishments). My former colleague, Reza Noubary, a math-stat professor at the Bloomsburg (PA) University, shares Khayyam's Persian heritage and also has a wide variety of achievements; one of his recent adventures has been with poetry. In 2020 his poetry collection, Feelings and Dealings, appeared -- and this year has brought forth his collection Khayyam in Rhyme (Fulton Books, 2021).
Khayyam in Noubary's volume is revealed as a mathematician through his thought-patterns more than through his words. Here is an intriguing sample from Chapter 1 (available for online browsing here); this sample shows first, the original Farsi, followed by two "translations"of the four that are offered):
Can our world be described using calculus?
The poem-a-day offering this morning (6/21/21) from poets.org gives me new ideas about describing a problem-situation using some terms from mathematics. I offer part of the poem below, followed by a link to the complete work.
from Disintegrating Calculus Problem by McKenzie Toma
A dramatic clue lodged in a rockface. Set in a shimmering sound belt slung around the grasses. Collections of numbers signify a large sum, a fatness that cannot be touched. Numbers are heart weight in script. Calculus means a small pebble pushed around maniacally. Binding affection, instead of fear, to largeness.
Ideas are peeled into fours and pinned on the warm corners of earth to flap in a wind. Wind, the product of a swinging axe that splits the sums. This math flowers on the tender back of the knee. . . . .
McKenzie Toma's complete poem appears here (with other poem-a-day offerings at poets.org) and and here (along with several others of her poems).
One of the treasures on my bookshelf is Images of a Complex World: The Art and Poetry of Chaos by University of Wisconsin poet Robin Chapman and physicist Julien Clinton Sprott (World Scientific, 2005). The following image by Sprott accompanies a poem entitled "The Traveling Salesman's Problem is NP-Difficult." Beneath the art, I offer the poem's opening lines -- and the complete poem and other art-poetry samples from the collection are available at this link.
 |
| an image of chaos by Julien Clinton Sprott |
One of my recent book-acquisitions is The Woman who Smashed Codes by Jason Fagone -- a story of Elizebeth Smith Friedman who transitioned from teaching and scholarship to codebreaking and became a hero of the National Security Agency during the much of the first half of the twentieth century.
In this book I have found (on page 91, discussion of some of the ideas of information-theory pioneer Claude Shannon; the story of Elizebeth includes telling of her meeting and falling in love with another codebreaker, William Friedman, and Fagone brings Shannon into the story with this remark:
. . . according to Shannon, making yourself understood by another person
is essentially a problem in cryptology ... When you fall in love, you develop
a compact encoding to share mental states more efficiently, cut noise,
and bring your beloved closer. All lovers, in this light, are codebreakers . . .
Also connecting love and mathematics is a poetry anthology from more than a dozen years ago -- a collection that I helped Sarah Glaz to gather and edit (and now available as an e-book): Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics (A K Peters/CRC Press, 2008). On page 135, these cryptic lines from Rafael Alberti, used as an epigraph for the poem "Mathematics" by Hanns Cibulka.
And the angel of numbers
is flying
from 1 to 2.
--Rafael Alberti
Cibulka's "Mathematics" may be found here. And this link leads to other postings in this blog that relate to Strange Attractors.
Millions of Brood X 17-year cicadas have recently emerged in the Washington, DC area and they are the subjects of laughter, fear, recipes, and so on. (Wikipedia information about these cicadas is available here.) Washington Post writer John Kelly has asked readers to celebrate the cicadas with verse -- and below I offer one of the Haiku that Kelly gathered recently.
 |
| Found here in The Washington Post |
The title of this blog-post is part of a headline from The Washington Post -- a headline for a review by GW Professor Lisa Page of a posthumously published and recently released memoir by Katherine Johnson (1918 - 2020) : My Remarkable Journey: A Memoir, written with assistance from Joylette Hylick, Katherine Moore and Lisa Frazier Page (Amistad, 2021).
As you might expect, numbers are at the center of Johnson's memoir -- numbers never intimidated Johnson — in fact, they thrilled her. The symmetry, the structural interplay of equations and formulas, were always in her head. (Read a bit of the book here.)
As Johnson looked back over her life of more than one hundred years, I too was prompted to looks back -- to an article of mine entitled "MATHEMATICS AND POETRY: ISOLATED OR INTEGRATED?" and published in the Humanistic Mathematics Network Newsletter (forerunner of the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics) in May, 1991 -- and available here. And I can't resist quoting a bit from the article, sharing some phrases from the poem "Poetry" by Marianne Moore (1887-1972).
. . . things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them
but because they are useful . . . the same thing
may be said for all of us—that we do not admire
what we cannot understand.
[Not until we] can present for inspection,
imaginary gardens with real toads in them
shall we have it . . .
Recently I re-found -- in my copy of The Mathematical Magpie by Clifton Fadiman (1904-1999) (Simon and Schuster, 1962) -- these lines by Lewis Untermeyer (1885-1977):
EINSTEIN: A PARODY IN THE MANNER OF EDW-N MARKH-M
We drew our circle that shut him out,
This man of Science who dared our doubt.
But ah, with a fourth-dimensional grin
He squared a circle that took us in.
Untermeyer's lines first appeared in his Collected Parodies. Here is a link to a second edition (1997) of The Mathematical Magpie (for which the title page description includes: stories, subsets of essays, rhymes, anecdotes, epigrams . . . rational or irrational . . .)
Teacher-poet-musician Glen Brown has shared with me his mathy poem that has for its epigraph a controversial line once spoken (back in 1992) by Mattel's Teen Talk Barbie. Brown makes playful use of a variety of math terms but with an somewhat sexist point of view.
Euclid and Barbie by Glen Brown
Math class is tough.
--Barbie
Sure it doesn’t add up:
countless camping and skiing trips with Ken,
swimming and skating parties without danger,
dancing and shopping engagements
with Midge and Skipper
like an infinite summer vacation.
Nothing here hints at a dull math class
for integral Barbie and her complex playmates!
You send me showers of verses, which I receive with much pleasure, as do we all; yet have we fears that this employment may seduce you from the path of Science, which you seem so destined to tread with so much honour to yourself and profit to others. Again and again I must repeat, that the composition of verse is infinitely more of an art than men are prepared to believe, and absolute success in it depends upon innumerable minutia, which it grieves me you should stoop to acquire a knowledge of.
Current investigation into the life of Hamilton has suggested that parts of Graves' work has been misinterpreted and that -- over time -- Hamilton's reputation has undeservedly declined; here is a link to a 2017 article by Anne van Weerden and Steven Wepster, "A most gossiped about genius: Sir William Rowan Hamilton" -- an article that adds new insights into the Hamilton story.
Lawrence "Larry" Lesser is a professor in the Mathematical Sciences Department at the University of Texas in El Paso and a widely published creator of mathy poems. Here are the opening stanzas of a poem that appeared in the Winter 2021 issue of Teaching for Excellence and Equity in Mathematics (TEEM), a journal of the NCTM affiliate organization TODOS: Mathematics for ALL.
from ₵AN
₵EL by Lawrence Mark Lesser
Cancel is from Latin for ‘make like a lattice’,
like crisscrossed wood fencing
in our backyard where we safely
dine with friends,
or like COVID-caused crossouts
on calendars--
a cancelled appointment (dis-appointment)
or music event (dis-concerting).
Teachers don’t like saying ‘cancel’
lest students get carried away,
cancelling sixes of 26/65,
which does equal two-fifths
New York's Museum of Mathematics celebrated National Limerick Day on May 12 with an online program of contributors reading their mathy limerick stanzas. I did not learn of the reading in time to apply for participation but here is a sample I might have submitted.
In baseball the diamonds are square--
And the ball has the shape of a sphere.
Nine guys make a team--
So, two teams make eighteen--
And fans cheer when plays come in pairs.
The limericks read at the May 12 MoMath program may be found here -- and here is a link to the results of a SEARCH in this blog for "limerick." The sample offered above was posted long ago, back in April 2010.
The first steps in mathematics . . . COUNTING!
I grew up on a farm and keeping track by counting happened often -- counting chickens, counting sheep, counting the number of weeks until the early transparent apples will be ripe . . . and when I read Tom Wayman's poem in Poet Lore I found a similar habit of relentless counting. I have not been able to obtain more than short-term permission for posting -- and so I offer here just a sample and, beneath, a a link to the full poem.
from Fifty Years of Stacking Chairs by Tom Wayman
Two of these chairs at a time
are easily manageable, so back at the empty rows
I fold three and haul them with both hands
across the space. Next trip I try
four: fingers on each hand curved
under the metal backrests of
two chairs. Fifty years
During recent days, one of my special enjoyments has been finding time to read Marian Christie's blog -- a delightful collection of poetry and poetic musings with frequent connections to mathematics. Christie's biographical sketch (available here) indicates that she, like me, grew up enjoying both poetry and math. She became a math teacher and, after her years of teaching ended, she turned her attention to poetry. Below I present a sample of her mathy poetry, followed by links to several of her postings.
Today, in a season that is approaching summer, I coolly offer Christie's "Midwinter" poem (found here in her blog) -- a stanza in which the poet uses Pascal's triangle to pattern her words:
 |
| a Pascal-triangle poem -- find it and lots of other mathy poems here. |
Here, next, are links to several of Christie's math-poetry blog postings. ENJOY!
In a recent search for funny mathy poems I have discovered the collection by G. Patrick Vennebush pictured below as well as a sequel to that edition and a related blog.
 |
| Book info available at this link. |
With my head in an oven
And my feet on some ice,
I’d say that, on average,
I feel rather nice!
Read more and enjoy . . .
Ideas become internalized when we WRITE about them -- and I encourage students AND all of us to write about climate change and efforts to save our planet. And then to act on our words! Here are three small syllable-squares, first appearing in a post more than ten years ago and expressing my ongoing concerns for precarious imbalances we have created within our natural environment.
1 This
2 year's the
3 fiftieth
4 birthday of the
5 Association
6 for Women in Mathe-
7 matics. Join celebrations --
8 hear lectures, game with playing cards,
9 interview, write essays that feature
10 math women you admire. Speak up -- cheer girls
11 who do well in math class; look back, remember,
12 laud stars of the past -- support A W M.
The Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) is a national organization devoted to encouraging women and girls to study and to have active careers in the mathematical sciences, and to promote equal opportunity and the equal treatment of women and girls in the mathematical sciences. Founding in 1971 and celebrating math-women with outreach, networks and partnerships, playing cards, essay contest (for students in middle school through college) . . . and so much more.
Explore AWM's Website and their lively WOMEN DO MATH site.
Many math-loving folks gather periodically at meetings called G4G (Gatherings for Gardner) to celebrate the life and contributions of Martin Gardner (1914-2010) -- a versatile author whom I know best from his "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American -- a column that often connected math and poetry.
Here is a link to the YouTube channel for G4G Celebrations -- a place to view presentations of ideas that honor the spirit of Martin Gardner. For one of the recent meetings of G4G (online due to Covid), graphic artist and designer of recreational mathematics puzzles, Kate Jones, offered a visual and poetic presentation entitled A Periodic Table of polyform puzzles.
 |
| This is the 3rd slide of Jones' presentation, "A Periodic Table of polyform puzzles" |
This link leads to a pdf of the 29 slides of Jones' presentation and this link leads to a 24-minute PowerPoint recording of the production; eventually this event will be available on the YouTube Channel noted above. Jones describes this creation in this way: It’s like a very condensed book on the subject; using rhymed couplets allowed for even more compact delivery of the information. She adds: at the gamepuzzles website, the various individual items in the puzzles can be seen more simply.
Here is a link to an earlier posting in this blog that includes a Fibonacci poem by Jones -- created for the 2016 meeting of G4G.
 |
| Published in 1979 by PRIMARY PRESS, out of print -- try your library! |
Before purchasing this anthology (found at a math conference) I had never seen a collection of mathy poems -- but then, many years later, I helped to edit one (Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics). Today I offer an old favorite from Against Infinity -- the poem "A Visit to Mathland" by Naomi Replansky (born May 23, 1918):
A Visit to Mathland by Naomi Replansky (for M., Z., and L., citizens thereof)
I was a timid tourist
to the land of mathematics:
how do you behave in a country
where Reason rules?
A wonderful resource for mathy poems for students is “S.T.E.A.M. Powered Poetry Videos for Pk-8” -- and I have recently connected there with poet and teacher, Heidi Bee Roemer; I offer a sample of her work below:
 |
| This poem -- and much more -- found at https://steampoweredpoetry.com/. |
Tomorrow (April 22) is Earth Day. This worried poem is structured using
The Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic.
(Some explanatory notes follow the poem.)
 |
| "We Are the Final Ones" by JoAnne Growney |
Mathematics Teacher Lisa Winer (St Andrews School, Boca Raton, FL) enjoys giving her students new sorts of learning experiences. In her eatplaymath blog, I found the results of her suggestion that students submit mathy poems to their school literary magazine. I offer below the first of the poems in the collection that Winer offers; go here to read more -- AND, consider a poetry project for math students that YOU know!
Fixed Mindset vs. Growth Mindset
I am bad at math (read top to bottom)
I am horrible at math
So I'll never say that
I can get an A.
But, if I try my hardest
I will fail.
A limerick is a five-line rhyming verse, usually humorous, often earthy and rude. Various limericks have appeared previous postings in this blog -- this one comes from the online journal Parody -- Poetry for the world as it really isn't.
I found Norwood's sexist limerick here in a July 2013 posting in Parody. Here is a link to previous postings in this blog of mathy limericks.
Using syllable counts to help to craft poems has been with us
since the sonnet and this blog has often presented square poems and Fibs
and Pilish and . .. and today we again focus on the digits of π. On
Pi-Day (3/14) Australia's Cosmos Magazine opened a Pi-Ku Contest which
asks for brief Haiku-like poems whose syllables-per-line are counted by
the first six digit of the decimal value of π. (Contest information is available at this link.) Entries must be submitted by 2Pi-Day, or 6/28.
Here are two mathy samples from the Cosmos contest-information site:
Learning STEM
is
necessary.
Do
remember science,
technology, engineering, maths. by Jennifer Chalmers
To say safe,
Keep
an area
of
Pi times one point five
metres squared around yourself always. by Lauren Fuge
Other poetry forms shaped by the digits of π include π-ku and Pilish.
Madhur Anand is a poet and a professor of ecology and environmental science at the University of Guelph in Ontario – her work has been noted here in earlier postings in this blog -- and today I want to introduce readers to her memoir, This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart (Penguin Random House, 2020).
On the opening page we find these poetic lines:
Biexponential Function by Madhur Anand
The
sharpest
memory
I have of a
book from my
childhood is one
entitled I Know What
I Like. I remember the
The Annual BRIDGES Math-Art
Conference will be virtual again this year (August 2-6, 2021) and
mathematician-poet Sarah Glaz has developed an online array of poets and
poetry to be part of this program. Bios and sample poems are already available here.
Participating poets include: Marian Christie, Carol Dorf, Susan Gerofsky. David Greenslade, Emily Grosholz, JoAnne Growney, Lisa Lajeunesse, Marco Lucchesi, Mike Naylor, Osmo Pekonen, Tom Petsinis, Eveline Pye, Any Uyematsu, Ursula Whitcher -- and, also, these open-mike participants: Susana Sulic, S. Brackert Robertson, Stephen Wren, Marion Deutsche Cohen, Connie Tetteborn, Jacob Richardson, Robin Chapman. Stephanie Strickland. (Bios and sample poems here.)
Here is a sample from the BRIDGES poetry program:
Descartes by Eeva-Liisa Manner
translated from the Finnish by Osmo Pekonen
I thought, but I wasn't.
I said animals were machines.
I had lost everything but my reason.
When creating a poem, I often find that first choosing a pattern of syllable counts can be very helpful in guiding me into careful word choices. I have used the Fibonacci numbers as a guide to forming the following lines. Information for these lines has come from a frightening story by Marcus Eriksen (March 23, 2021 in the Washington Post).
Save
the
world from
plastics, Now!
Don't allow more deaths
of desert camels, painful deaths
caused by eating humans' trash within its plastic bags --
chewed plastic not digestible --
causing ulcers and
lots of pain,
leading
to
death.
After a pair of 1's to start the sequence, each succeeding Fibonacci number is the sum of the preceding two numbers: Above we have (climbing and then reversing): 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 8, 5, 3, 2, 1, 1.
Gregory Coxson, professor and researcher in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the US Naval Academy, is a supporter of integration of the arts with the sciences and enjoys writing poems. (Here is a link to his previous appearances in this blog.) Recently Greg has sent me what he calls a CUBE poem (6 stanzas, 6 lines per stanza, 6 syllables per line). It's FUN to read -- I offer it below:
If I Wrote Poetry by Gregory Coxson
If I wrote poetry
It would be efficient,
Stripped-down, like Chinese art,
Only the sparest lines
Placed by easy habit
Learned from ten thousand tries
Emmy Noether (1882-1935) is one of my heroes -- and my first posting in this blog, on March 23, 2010, celebrates her -- as do a bunch of other more recent postings.
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| Above, the epigraph for my poem about Noether, "My Dance is Mathematics." |
TODAY, March 21 is UNESCO World Poetry Day: click on this link for a wealth of information and poetry resources: UNESCO Creative Cities of Literature join forces to celebrate World Poetry Day 2021 | Creative Cities Network.
"Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas."
--- Albert Einstein
Each issue of The New Yorker offers poetry, but seldom do the poems link to mathematics. However, the issue for March 8, 2021 offers us "Number Theory" by poet and translator Rosanna Warren. Here are a few of its lines:
. . . like you, inquisitive. You sit
taut in your chair, whispering, as you probe
the gaps between prime numbers. Until infinity.
It's pattern you seek. The opening through which
your thought will glide suddenly into a lit space
and be at home. . . .
Here is a link to Warren's complete poem.
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