March is Women's History Month; March 23 1882 is the birthdate of Emmy Noether (1882-1935). Here is a photo of Noether from a Twitter X posting from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at St. Andrews -- and it is followed by a stanza from a poem about Noether that I was inspired to write many years ago; following those lines, a link to previous poetic postings about Noether in this blog.
On Saturday, March 23 at 2 PM, a poetry-event is planned at Descanso Gardens in La Cañada Flintridge, California to celebrate the life of poet, math teacher, and activist Amy Uyematsu (1947-2023). It was my pleasure to be connected to Amy via various math-related events and her work has been included in previous postings in this blog. (Here's a link to a list of those earlier posts.)
One of my favorite poems of Amy's is "The Meaning of Zero: A Love Poem." The complete poem is found here at Poets. org and in the collection Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics-- and I offer its opening stanzas below.
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| Uyematsu's complete poem is available at this link. |
When I pick up a pen to write on a particular subject, often it is useful me to try to follow a pattern for rhymes or syllable-counts -- for the effort to conform to a pattern challenges me to think about my topic in new ways. In the history of poetry, rhyme-choices were frequent--yielding sonnets, villanelles and a variety of other forms.
In recent years, online and printed versions of poems have become very accessible and the principle, "Rhymes help us remember" has become less of a focus in poetry. One of the popular connections between math and poetry has been the use of Fibonacci numbers to choose syllable counts; especially popular has been the FIB, a six-line stanza in which the syllable-counts are 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, and 8 -- the first six Fibonacci numbers. (Inventor of the FIB was Greg Pincus, and lots of information is provided here in this 2010 blog posting, Poems with Fibonacci number patterns.)
Soon it will be Pi-Day (3.14) and this year I again call your attention to a poem by one of my long-time favorite poets -- the poem "Pi" by Polish Nobel Prize-winning poet Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012). I offer a portion of the poem below (followed by a link to the complete poem).
from Pi by Wiwlawa Szymborska
(translated from Polish by Clare Cavanaugh and Stanislaw Baranczak (1946-2014)).
The admirable number pi:
three point one four one
All the following digits are also initial,
five nine two because it never ends.
It can’t be comprehended six five three five at a glance,
eight nine by calculation,
seven nine or imagination,
not even three two three eight by wit, that is, by comparison
four six to anything else
two six four three in the world.
The longest snake on earth call it quits at about forty feet.
Likewise, snakes of myth and legend, though they may
hold out a bit longer.
The pageant of digits comprising the number pi
doesn’t stop at the page’s edge. . . .
. . .
The entire Szymborska-poem is may be found here at the website "Famous Poets and Poems" and also here in an online pdf of the booklet Numbers and Faces: A Collection of Poems with Mathematical Imagery -- a collection that I edited on behalf of the Humanistic Mathematics Network.
This link connects to a list of previous blog-posts of Pi-related poems.
Now in March -- in Women's History Month -- many writers are taking a bit of extra time to explore the history and achievements of women. It was my delight to find a March 6 posting here on the Poetry Blogging Network with a list of celebrated women in poetry that includes several writers of mathy poems. Of the ten poets listed, the following five have been included in this blog -- in earlier postings. For each, I include a mathy sample and the poet's name is linked to earlier postings that include their work.
Adrienne Rich from Planetarium
a woman ‘in the snow
among the Clocks and instruments
or measuring the ground with poles
in her 98 years to discover
8 comets
One of the challenging AND enriching qualities of both mathematics and poetry is the multiplicity of meanings that particular expressions may have. This quality also is found in jokes -- and in the Math Blog of MIT math-scholar Tanya Khovanova I recently enjoyed some entertaining mathy riddle-jokes and below I offer a sample:
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| Here is a link to Khovanova's complete blog-posting. Enjoy! |
A poetry event that I often enjoy is the posting by the Academy of American Poets of a poem-a-day -- today's poem is found here and information about the posting is found here at Poets.org. my background in mathematics helped me to be especially pleased early this month (on 2/2) when the daily poem (written by poet and artist Brad Walrond) was entitled "Calculus I, II, III" -- and if offers reflection on different levels of learning. Below I offer a few lines from the poem; the complete poem is available at this link.
from Calculus I, II, and III by Brad Walrond
. . . this calculus
—how one body
relates to another—
that disturbs all the peace
is the same as learning
their one two threes . . .
Copyright © 2024 by Brad Walrond. Read more here.
One of my favorite websites to visit is "Poetry and Mathematics" -- a blog from poet Marian Christie. Today I focus on her posting of poems with word-lengths structured by Pascal's Triangle; here is a sample:
As we study mathematics and learn of outstanding mathematicians, many of us do not also learn which of those mathematicians also were poets. A posting that I found recently in Marian Christie's blog, Poetry and Mathematics, features poetry by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831-39).
Maxwell's verse also is featured in the math-poetry anthology, Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics (A.K Peters, Ltd., 2008); preview available here at amazon.com.
Below I offer a stanza from a Maxwell poem (posted in this blog back in December, 2015) -- a stanza that shows the long-mistaken attitude that has existed about inferior abilities of math-women:
Occasionally I Google the pair "mathematics, poetry" to see what a web search can find for me. Many of the sites found this way are familiar -- including this blog and poetry I have cited herein. But a few days ago I found a new site -- posted by the New England Literary Resource Center and featuring poems by a GED teacher Phillip Howard (at the Adult Literacy Center at Dorchester, MA) and his students. Howard asks his students to write poems about math as a way of communicating their accomplishments and frustrations. Here is the poem that Howard offers his students; their responses are collected here.
Me & Math by Phillip Howard
I have a problem … a math problem
Math is always throwing problems at me
I solve 1 and Boom Math throws a harder 1
A Brain Buster … so I rage
But I can’t GIVE UP MATH
Math is in my blood … PROBLEMS CALL 2 ME
I want 2 BREAK THE HABIT … but I can’t
So I push MATH
I push on the WEB
I push on the STREETS
I push in the CLASS
I push MATH 2 YOU
So YOU 2 have a MATH PROBLEM
In my recent use of Google -- in search of mathy poems -- I came across this website: 38 Math Poems for Students in All Grade Levels (a featured page at weareteachers.com). It contains these words:
"Poetry can transforms kids’ attitudes about math exponentially!"
Here's a sample.
And here is a link to more about poet Rebecca Kai Dotlich.
As frequent readers of this blog know, I am indebted to many people for their contributions of poems -- their own and links to others. An alert to today's poem came from Canadian poet Alice Major -- with previous contibutions to this blog found at this link. The poem, "BOUNDARY CONDITIONS" by Sneha Madhavan-Reese was published in the journal Rattle. I offer, below, its opening and closing stanzas, followed by a link to the complete poem.
from BOUNDARY CONDITIONS by Sneha Madhavan-Reese
who but men blame the angels for the wild
exceptionalism of men? —Sam Sax, “Anti-Zionist Abecedarian”
Along the border of any governed region, there exists a value which must
satisfy its laws. This is a rule I learned for solving differential equations.
Poet Nikki Giovanni is someone I much admire -- for her poetry and for her activism -- and recently I had had a chance to see the documentary film "Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project." I valued learning more about Giovanni's life and was reminded to revisit her poetry. In her 1975 collection, The Woman and the Men (of which I have an autographed copy), I re-found her poem "The Way I Feel" and I offer below its mathy final stanza during this 2024 leap year.
from THE WAY I FEEL by Nikki Giovanni
in my mind you're a clock
and i'm the second hand sweeping
around you sixty times an hour
twenty-four hours a day
three-hundred-sixty-five days a year
and an extra day
in leap year
cause that's the way
that's the way
that's the way i feel
about you
from The Women and the Men (William Morrow & Company, New York, 1975)
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| From Solo: A Journal of Poetry, 1996. |
In the days and years since my schooling, the numbers of math-women have increased and their public recognition also has increased. But not enough! This list of 18 remarkable women in STEM includes only one math-woman AND. here are several book-seller links to explore:
Headstrong: 52 Women Who Changed Science-and the World
30 Remarkable Women in Science and Math
The First Woman in Space: Valentina Tereshkova
20 Greatest Mathematicians: Masters of Mathematics from the Past, Present, Future
A very important math-influence in my life was my high school math teacher for my junior and senior years, Laura Church. Today, exploring the internet, searching for her name, I found only this memorial statement and, although it tells of her teaching at Indiana Joint High School, it does not mention that her teaching-subject was math. Here is a stanza that celebrates her:
One of my recent finds has been an article that offers a list of 20 films about math, mathematicians, and math-geniuses. Eagerly, I opened the article to read about the films and to see which of them also involved poetry. ALAS, I did not find that these math-people connected with poetry. Following that non-find, I turned to a favorite source of mathy poems to discover something to post.
That favorite source is Against Infinity, edited by Ernest Robson and Jet Wimp (Primary Press, 1979 and now out of print); this collection has been on my shelf for many years and is the first math-poetry anthology that I ever encountered. Here is a poem from that collection, written by a Missouri high school senior, Carol Clark.
During January 4-7, 2024, mathematics meetings were held in San Francisco, CA. Although unable to attend, I have spent some time browsing abstracts of the presentations there and found several that involve poetry. Suzanne Sumner of the University of Mary Washington, gave a presentation entitled "How Poetry Informs the History of Mathematics" and here is a link to the abstract for Sumner's presenation.
From Sumner's abstract I learn that the ancient Sanskrit scholar Acharya Pingala was likely to have been the first to use Fibonacci numbers and Pascal's triangle in his poetry. Using this blog's SEARCH feature, I found this link to prior mentions of Fibonacci in this blog and this link to mentions of Pascal.
Recently my thoughts have turned often to these mathy-poetic words by Danish-American comedian-musician Victor Borge (1909-2000):
Laughter is the
shortest distance
between two people.
* * * *
Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.
Isaac Asimov (1920-1992)
This quote from science fiction writer Isaac Asimov is found here along with other related views. For me also -- with poetry or math or some other subject -- writing is an important thinking strategy: my fingers with my pen lead me to new ideas. And counting syllables shapes my words like this:
I
start with
just a few
words -- and write them --
AND my fingers help
to develop my thoughts.
One of the wonderful supporters of connections between mathematics and the arts has been BRIDGES, a conference-gathering that was initiated by Reza Sarhanghi (1952-2016) in 1998.
Here, at the BRIDGES website, one may find information about the upcoming 2024 conference. This website also offers -- via the link Papers Archive -- access to conference papers from 1998 to 2023.
Poetry became part of the conference in 2011 and, at the link Mathematical Poetry, we are taken to a website maintained by math-poet Sarah Glaz -- a website that offers access to a vast and wonderful collection of poems, anthologies, recordings, videos, . . .
Below I include an anthology sample, a very fine poem by Deanna Nikaido from the Bridges Stockholm 2018 Anthology.
Ratio by Deanna Nikaido
They say there are two sides to everything.
STUDENTS – Middle School, High School, College
Write a Mathy POEM
OR
Interview a Math-Woman, write an ESSAY about her
Entries are being accepted now – and up to FEBRUARY 1, 2024.
Information about the MATH-POETRY competition is available here.
Information about the MATH-WOMAN ESSAY CONTEST is available here.
As the year ends, remembering an important truth . . .
The true spirit of delight, the exultation,
the sense of being more than man,
which is the touchstone of the highest excellence,
is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.
Bertrand Russell (1972-1970)
As I enjoy the brightness that Christmas tree lights bring to a grey day, I am reminded of the following poem by Brian Bilston, found on Twitter (X) early in December:
Previous mentions of Brian Bilston in this blog may be found at this link.
One of my favorite memories of Christmas when I was a child involves recitation -- with family or classmates -- of this holiday rhyme, "The Twelve Days of Christmas." I include a few lines below, and a here is a link to the entire poem:
On the first day of Christmas,
my true love sent to me
A partridge in a pear tree.
On the second day of Christmas,
my true love sent to me
Two turtle doves,
And a partridge in a pear tree.
On the third day of Christmas,
my true love sent to me
Three French hens,
Two turtle doves,
And a partridge in a pear tree.
On the fourth day of Christmas,
my true love sent to me
Four calling birds,
Three French hens,
Two turtle doves,
And a partridge in a pear tree.
. . . Read more here.
Often I try to unravel the intricacies of a new idea by writing -- using communication with my fingers as steps toward understanding. And when I found the poem below (here at the website VIA NEGATIVA) I saw it also as a poem of discovery -- and I offer it to you:
Every Line Intersects the Line
at Infinity at Some Point by Luisa A. Igloria
"Out of nothing I have created a strange new universe." - János Bolyai (1802-1860)
The optometrist asks you to look into
the autorefractor: two dark lines form
a road that stretches from where you sit
to a red barn at the horizon. If your brain
tells you that you're looking at a point
at infinity rather than just mere inches away,
it helps the eyes focus. Things have to end
somewhere, don't they? In projective geometry,
The website for Agnes Scott College has a wonderful collection of biographies of math women -- and today I focus particularly on the story of mathematician Marie-Sophie Germain (1776-1831). I quote below a few words about Germain:
Sophie began teaching herself mathematics using the books in her father's library. Her parents felt that her interest was inappropriate for a female (the common belief of the middle-class in the 19th century) and did all that they could to discourage her.
Related to the idea expressed in this quote is a thoughtful poem about Germain by Colorado poet Jessy Randall; the poem is part of Randall's very special collection Mathematics for Ladies, Goldsmiths Press, 2022 and I offer it below:
One of the very special online resources for connections between mathematics and poetry (and also other art forms) is the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics. Edited by California mathematicians Mark Huber of Claremont McKenna College and Gizem Karaali of Pomona College, this free-access journal has online issues published each six months -- available here.
Poetry of many different forms is available in JHM -- and a poem from the January, 2023 issue that I enjoyed rereading recently is "Mathematics" by Northwestern Math Professor Kim Regnier Jongerius -- a poem inspired by the song "Memories" from the musical Cats and describing some of the joys and frustrations inherent in doing mathematical work. I offer one of its stanzas below and I invite you to go here (to the JHM website) to read more.
from Mathematics by Kim Regnier Jongerius
Mathematics!
I must wait for an insight
Try to think of connections
That I haven't before.
When the day breaks with no solution coming to me
Then my courage sinks to the floor.
Enjoy all six stanzas of the poem here in JHM.
THANK YOU, Jongerius and JHM for sharing thought-provoking words.
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| A Fib about how I think and learn |
Found in a posting on November 26 on Twitter the following thoughtful lines -- featuring counting -- by poet and editor Dr. Maya C. Popa,
I was led to this information by a recent (11/23/23) posting by @OxUniMaths on 𝕏 (at https://twitter.com/home)
Mathematicians Germano Cardano and Nicolo Tartaglia lived in Italy in the 16th century. When Cardano tried to persuade Tartaglia to tell him the solution method for to cubic equations, he received a description that he calls a poem. Andrew Wiles discusses this situation in a YouTube video, as part of his talk on the Langlands program. The posting by @OxUniMaths on 𝕏 offers a brief section of that talk -- and includes this translation (from the original Italian) of Tartaglia's poem:
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| Tartaglia considers solving a cubic |
Years ago -- when I was the only woman in the Bloomsburg University mathematics department -- I wrote a poem, "My Dance is Mathematics," about the mathematician Emmy Noether -- and it contained the following lines:
If a woman's dance is mathematics,
She dances alone.
But things are changing! Founded in 1971, AWM (Association for Women in Mathematics) has been actively celebrating the lives of female mathematicians -- and one of AWM's current and far-reaching activities is a STUDENT ESSAY CONTEST for which students -- in middle-school, high-school, and college categories -- are invited to interview a female mathematician and write about her. The essay-submission period is December 1, 2023 - February 1, 2024. Questions may be directed to AWM Essay Contest Organizer, Dr. Johanna Franklin (johanna.n.franklin@hofstra.edu).
Via an X (Twitter) posting by poet and blogger Marian Christie (@marian_v_o), I learned about a blog by writer Mike Ferguson entitled Gravy from the Gazebo -- available at this link. Ferguson has posted a series of mathy list poems -- starting on November 10 with "Adding list poem". The poem's opening lines are offered below and the complete poem is found at this link.
The poem is introduced with these words: Love a list poem, this is my latest – the kind of content and ideas I would like to introduce to students for writing their own:
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| Opening lines of a poem by Mike Ferguson -- the rest is here. |
Ferguson next offered more lists: "Subtracting list poem" at this link AND "Multiplying list poem" at this link AND "Dividing list poem" at this link.
Read. Reread. Share. Write your poetic response. Share!
Carol Dorf is a retired math teacher and poet -- and at New Verse News I have discovered one of her recent mathy poems, "TRAJECTORY," posted on 10/09/2023. I offer its opening lines below.
from TRAJECTORY by Carol Dorf
The problem set gives us: a stone, force, an angle.
Given this, predict when the stone will hit the ground.
Outside the book this problem grows more complex
even if there are no dragons to interfere with the trajectory.
Imagine a missile. No don’t. There’s no need to imagine:
haven’t you opened the paper today? Imagine a war
where children’s bodies form the location of the necessary
violence. Don’t authorities always say necessary?
. . . . . Dorf's complete TRAJECTORY is available at this link.
Carol Dorf is a Zoeglossia fellow, whose poetry has been published in several chapbooks and in a wide variety of journals; and she is a founding poetry editor of Talking Writing.
Here is a link to the New Verse News website -- a collection of many, many poems. This link leads to poems at that site by Carol Dorf, including "Trajectory."
Recently I have discovered (at the website of the American Mathematical Society, AMS) a blog posting that features my blog. Entitled "A Tour of Intersections: Poetry with Mathematics," the posting by math and science writer Rachel Crowell. Below I post a sample:
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| "MATH WOMAN" -- acrostic poem by JoAnne Growney |
Middle School Students
High School Students
College Students
Share YOUR POEMS via the 2024 Math-Poetry Contest
sponsored by the American Mathematical Society
Submit between November 27, 2023 and February 1, 2024
Detailed instructions for contest entries are found AT THIS LINK!
One of the important math-poetry projects that I have been involved in is Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics, a poetry anthology collected and edited by mathematician-poet Sarah Glaz and me -- published by AK Peters/CRC Press in 2008 and now available on Kindle and at various online used-book sites.
A poem in Strange Attractors that I have been drawn to again recently is "Ode to Numbers" by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904-1973). Here are its opening lines:
from Ode to Numbers by Pablo Neruda
Oh, the thirst to know
how many!
The hunger
to know
how many
stars in the sky!
An interesting story that Google led me to is told in this article about "Zero Man of India" -- the article tells of Shahbaz Khan, famously known as Shahbaz Hakbari, a multifaceted individual with talent in poetry, prose, mathematics, and education -- well-educated AND he he is a widely celebrated teacher.
"Mathematics and poetry may seem like two different worlds, but both require creativity, imagination, and thinking outside the box," Shahbaz Khan explained.
The article "Zero Man of India" contains many mentions of Khan/Hakbari's life as a poet -- but has no poems. Nonetheless, the phrases quoted are poetic -- and, below, I have given two of them the shapes of poems.
Poet-Laureate of the United States (2003-2004), winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, Louise Glück died recently. (10/13/23) (A biographical sketch and many of Glück's poems are available here at poets.org.) The quotation below -- sharing her desire "to make something never heard before" -- links closely to the desires of those of us in mathematics, to create the new.
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| A quote given with Gluck's obituary in The Washington Post |
This 2020 blog posting features Gluck's "Parable of the Swans" and here, at poetryfoundation.org, is "A Fable" -- a poem about two women and one baby.
Like a circle, the "lazy 8" or infinity symbol -- shown below --never ends.
The second Tuesday in October -- this year, Tuesday, October 10 -- is Ada Lovelace Day.. Details of the celebration planned by The Royal Institution of Science are available here at this link. A careful biography of this pioneering female mathematician -- Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) -- is available here.
"Ada Lovelace Day (ALD) is an international celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM). It aims to increase the profile of women in STEM and, in doing so, create new role models who will encourage more girls into STEM careers and support women already working in STEM." Quote from https://findingada.com/.
Although her father, poet Lord Byron, had no interest in mathematics, Ada's mother, Lady Byron, was supportive as was astronomer-mathematician Mary Somerville (1780-1872) -- who became a longtime friend and math-encourager. (Lots more details of Lovelace's math-life are available here at the St Andrews Math-History website and her pioneering work with the Analytical Engine is featured here.)
Below is a poem by Twitter poet Brian Bilston (@brian_bilston) that celebrates Ada Lovelace.
Today (October 9, 2023) is Indigenous Peoples Day -- and I call attention to a thought-provoking activist poem by Linda Hogan, a member of the Chickasaw Nation and an important contributor to indigenous literature. Here are the opening lines of Hogan's "Embodied."
I am embodied first by the numbers
given by my grandparents,
no choice but to sign the Dawes Act.
Hogan's complete poem is available here in World LIterature Today.
A portion of Hogan's poem was also posted here in this blog -- back in 2020.
From Sharon Jones at Connell Co-op College in Manchester, UK, I have learned about National Poetry Day -- an event organised by Forward Arts Foundation and held on the first Thursday of October -- an annual celebration encouraging everyone to make, experience, and share poetry with family and friends. Today, October 5, I celebrate the day by offering one of Sharon Jones' poems.
Turing's Sunflowers by Sharon Jones
The International Congress of Mathematicians meets every four years (next in 2026) and, at these meetings, awards the Fields Medal -- an award given to two or three or four outstanding mathematicians aged 40 or younger. The year 2014 was the first in which a woman won this medal -- "For her outstanding contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces." -- she was Maryam Mirzakhani (1977-2017) -- who died too young of breast cancer.
In her collection, Mathematics for Ladies: Poems on Women in Science (Goldsmiths Press, 2022), Jessy Randall has a poem that celebrates Mirzakhani -- and I offer it below.
MARYAM MIRZAKHANI (1977-2017) by Jessy Randall
Poet Marian Christie's blog, Poetry and Mathematics -- found at https://marianchristiepoetry.net/ -- is a website I much enjoy visiting; there I learn many many new things. (Here is a link that leads to a list of my previous postings that feature Christie and her work.)
The idea that the shape of a poem may be part of its message is not new -- but Christie has brought more than line-length and syllable-count into the picture and today I focus on her Circular Poems.
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| A Circular poem by Marian Christie |
My friend Gregory Coxson (engineering professor at the US Naval Academy) is an explorer of new ideas and I enjoy his frequent emails that share his discovered math-poetry connections. Recently Coxson introduced me to the website of retired Virginia Tech professor Ezra Brown and, following the link Inspirational and Fun Stuff, I found this interesting collection of number-related Haiku -- beginning with a recollection of September 11.
Day of Horror
There is no doubt that
on September Eleventh
God sat down and cried.
“I worked hard…”
Bach was prolific:
One thousand compositions
and twenty children.
Learning about AI and exploring its possibilities has been an interesting recent activity for me. One of my own favorite math-related poems is a poem I wrote many years ago about mathematician Emmy Noether -- and that poem, "My Dance is Mathematics," is available here in this blog at this link. I offer below a poem from ChatGPT; my instructions were: write a poem about Emmy Noether -- and I got this:
In realms of math where brilliance takes its flight,
There dwells a star whose radiance shines so bright,
Emmy Noether, a name of boundless grace,
A mathematician whose legacy we embrace.
Born in Erlangen, a spark in her eyes,
She defied the norms, reached for the skies,
In a time when women faced a daunting door,
She pushed it open, forevermore.
A wonderful place to visit is PLANET INFINITY -- a website maintained by Rashmi Kathuria, math teacher from Delhi, India. Exploring this site I found, in the posting for July 24. 2012, the following poem. Rashmi Kathuria introduces the poem with the following statement.
"Yesterday one of my school student came to me and shared her self composed poem on her feelings regarding Mathematics. Shreeya composed it when she was in grade 8."
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| A posting of student poetry from Planet Infinity. |
Mathematics is a beautiful subject. It is the way in which it is taught and learnt makes it difficult or boring. -- Rashmi Kathuria
One of the interesting regular online postings is a new science poem EVERY FRIDAY -- offered by Sam Illingworth via an email subscription or in his Poetry of Science blog. Recently I have found and valued Illingworth's interview late in 2020 with poet Donald Beagle, author of the poetry collection, Driving into the Dreamtime (Library Partners Press, 2020).
One of Beagle's publications involved editing a poetry collection by James Radcliffe Squires (1917-1993) -- a collection in which many of the poems are informed by science. Here is a sample from Squires' collection Where the Compass Spins -- now presented in Radcliffe Squires: Selected Poems; edited by Donald Beagle).
“…We are one motion and we see
Another. Then we overtake two flying birds
And at the crisis of the wan parabola
Assume their speed. Thus motion dies…”
The lines above are from Squires' poem “The Subway Bridge, Charles Station to Kendall.” This same poem concludes by touching upon the Einsteinian concept of the gravitational bending of light: “Faring with the straightness that curves. The line / Of brightness bending as it nears the sun.” When you have an available hour, visit and enjoy the whole of Illingworth's 2020 posting about Donald Beagle's poetry.
Back in June I found an interesting article online by USAToday Entertainment Editor Pamela Avila that raises questions about how to read poetry -- questions that are similar to those asked about reading mathematics. I offer samples below:
Here are words from poet Clint Smith, author of new poetry collection Above Ground and writer for The Atlantic:
"Sometimes we're taught to read poetry as if it's a code that we have to unlock or that it's a puzzle or a geometric proof with a specific answer," says "I don't think that that's what poems are or should be." ("Counting Descent" is a mathy poem that explores Smith's family history.)
The beauty of a poem can lie in not knowing.
Some of us -- perhaps because of the structure of our minds, perhaps because of our education -- focus strongly on a few key ideas. And some of us -- perhaps this is common among teachers -- focus on the linking of ideas that we encounter. My own learning activity seems to be hybrid and to focus on linking and integrating -- perhaps stemming from my childhood mix of rural and urban environments, perhaps from my interests in both mathematics and poetry.
It is a delight for me to learn of growing numbers of teachers who are combining STEAM subjects with the arts -- and one of the outstanding contributors to this effort is children's author and teacher Heidi Bee Roemer. Roemer is one of the contributors to the website Steam Powered Poetry and recently I found on YouTube her poem. "Going Bananas" -- about mean, median, and mode . A text version of "Going Bananas" may be found in this April 2021 posting.
Here is a link to a broad selection of steam powered poetry videos.
One of my much-appreciated math-poetry connections is with Scott W. Williams, a Professor of Mathematics at SUNY Buffalo and author of many scholarly papers and many poems. In a recent issue of the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics (JHM) I found (and valued reading) his "Impossible Haiku" -- a series of Haiku-stanzas that play with the Collatz Conjecture -- an unproven belief that for any starting number these two steps, performed in appropriate succession, eventually reach the number 1:
If the number is odd, multiply by 3 and add 1; if the number is even, divide it by 2.
Williams' "Impossible Haiku" may be found at this link. Another mathy poem by Williams (found here at his website) that I especially value is the one that I offer below -- a poem dedicated to his mother.
THE NINE-SIDED DIAMOND by Scott Williams
Since 2003, SPLIT THIS ROCK has been an activist poetry organization that protests war and injustice. Besides readings and conferences, Split this Rock also connects members by emailing a POEM OF THE WEEK series. Most often, these poems are not mathematical in nature -- but one of the recent offerings is a verbal picture that uses numbers -- "meat market" by New York multidisciplinary artist Lara Attallah. I include a portion of this poem below.
meat market by Lara Atallah
after Lebanon, a country with one of the worst economic crises since the nineteenth century
the price of bread has gone up again. throngs of cars
slouch towards shuttering gas stations. the currency, a farce
with each swing of the gavel, numbers
soar. fifty thousand pounds by day’s end,
I am a long-time member of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) -- an organization (with administrative offices in Washington, DC) whose mission is "to advance the understanding of mathematics and its impact on our world." The MAA website states:
Our members include university, college, middle, and high school mathematics faculty; graduate and undergraduate students; pure and applied mathematicians; computer scientists; statisticians; and many others in government, business, and industry. We welcome all who are interested in the mathematical sciences.
An important feature on the MAA website is their Math Values blog -- which has frequent postings from diverse voices within mathematics; these postings include important mathematical information and also math's connections to the larger world -- including teaching and learning, the arts, practical math-applications . . .and more . . .
Recently in the Math Values blog I came across this posting (from June 2023) by Czech poet and artist Radoslav Rochallyi of what he calls VECTOR poetry; here is a screen-shot of a sample -- a poem developed from the phrase: “Time is pouring out of my broken watch glass. You look ahead, and you're right. Because the potential of the past is just … a sandcastle.”
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