Mother-daughter geometry -- in poetry . . .

     Last week (July 9) was the birthday of my mother -- and, although her body lies in a grave, her spirit continues to dance (and to both inform and confuse me).  Recently published in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics (January 2019 issue) this poem by Jenny Patton -- a creative writing teacher at Ohio State University and a wellness coach -- has been provoking my memories. 

       Geometry of Night     by Jenny Patton

       In three-dimensional Euclidean space,
       lines in a plane that do not meet are parallel.

       My beautiful aunt loved to sleep, blogs
       my insomniac cousin about my mother
       who went to her parallel life every night.

       Those studying Playfair’s axiom note the
       constant distance between parallel lines. 

"The Reckoning" by M. Sorescu (Romania,1936-96)

Works by poet and playwright  Marin Sorescu (1936-1996) continue to be popular with Romanian readers--and he is one of the most-frequently translated of Romanian poets.  In "The Reckoning" we see and hear his irony twisting among images chosen from mathematics.

When parallel lines meet, that is LOVE

Bernadette Turner teaches mathematics at Lincoln University in Missouri. And, via a long-ago email (lost for a while, and then found) she has offered this love poem enlivened by the terminology of geometry.

Parallel Lines Joined Forever    by Bernadette Turner

       We started out as just two parallel lines
       in the plane of life.
       I noticed your good points from afar,
       but always kept same distance.
       I assumed that you had not noticed me at all.  

Reaching out . . .

Consider the geometry and community of  trees .  Can we learn from them?

          We plant two trees.

          Their trunks grow strong
          and straight--and parallel.
          Parallel lines don't meet.

          These trees, however--
          straight and tall and parallel--
          reach out with branches.

Personal geometry

We have recently passed the first anniversary of the death (6 May 2010) of Elena Shvarts, one of Russia's finest contemporary poets. Here is her "Poetica -- More Geometrico" (translated into English by Thomas Epstein).

Split This Rock 2014

     Plan now to attend the 4th national biennial Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness in Washington, DC, March 27-30, 2014.  The sixteen poets to be featured at the 2014 festival are:  Sheila Black, Franny Choi, Eduardo C. Corral, Gayle Danley, Natalie Diaz, Joy Harjo, Maria Melendez Kelson, Yusef Komunyakaa, Dunya Mikhail, Shailja Patel, Wang Ping, Claudia Rankine, Tim Seibles, Myra Sklarew, Danez Smith, and Anne Waldman.   The website SplitThisRock.org offers photographs and more information about the festival.  It will be awesome!  

Where Will the Parallels Meet?

      One of my favorite poets -- with a varied selection of mathy poems -- is the Czech poet Miroslav Holub (1923-28), an immunologist as well as a poet and one who also wrote about the horrors of World War II.

     Here is one of his poems that I gathered in this 2001 collection Numbers and Faces:  A Collection of Poems with Mathematical Imagery, entitled "The Parallel Syndrome."

The Parallel Syndrome   by Miroslav Holub  (translated by Ewald Osers)

          Two parallels
          always meet
          when we draw them by our own hand.

          The question is only
          whether in front of us
          or behind us.

          Whether that train in the distance
          is coming
          or going.

The collection named above, in which Holub's poem appears, is available here.
This link leads to results of a blog search for previously posted poems by Holub..

Explore a new idea by writing a poem . . .

      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, 

Math-Stat Awareness Month -- find a poem!

APRIL is Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month
AND
National Poetry Month!

 Celebrate with a MATHY POEM, found here in this blog!  Scroll down!

If you are looking for mathy poems on a particular topic, the SEARCH box in the right-column may help you find them. For example, here is a link to posts found when I searched using the term "parallel."  And here are posts that include the term "angle."   To find a list of additional useful search terms, scroll down the right-hand column. 

For your browsing pleasure, here are the titles and dates of previous blog postings,

moving backward from the present.  Enjoy!

Mar 31  Math and poetry in film
Mar 28  Split this Rock, Freedom Plow Award, April 21
Mar 27  Math-themed poems at Poets.org
Mar 23  Remember Emmy Noether! 

Geometry of Love

     A couple of weeks ago my "Google Alert" linked me to a posting of a science poem concerning "the geometry of love."  The posting -- at The Finch and Pea -- is a poem that is both elegant and precise (and one that has been included in the anthology, Strange Attractors:  Poems of Love and Mathematics, that Sarah Glaz and I collected and edited several years ago).  Here it is:

The Definition of Love     by Andrew Marvell (England, 1621-1678)

My love is of a birth as rare
As ‘tis for object strange and high;
It was begotten by Despair
Upon Impossibility.  

Creation Myth on a Mobius Band

On the  website of Bert-Jaap Koops, I found this small poem by a poet I admire greatly, Howard Nemerov (1920-1991).

     Creation Myth on a Moebius Band   by Howard Nemerov

     This world’s just mad enough to have been made
     by the Being His beings into Being prayed.

Celebrating Ada Lovelace

Recently I have purchased the anthology, Raising Lilly Ledbetter:  Women Poets Occupying the Workplace (edited by Caroline Wright, M.L. Lyons & Eugenia Toledo, Lost Horse Press, 2015), and have found in it dozens of wonderful poems, including several that celebrate women of science.  Below I offer a poem by New York poet Jo Pitkin that honors Ada Lovelace (1815-1852).  

Bird, Moon, Engine     by Jo Pitkin

Like a fence or a wall to keep me from harm,
tutors circled me with logic, facts, theorems.
But I hid the weeds growing wild in my mind.

By age five, I could plot the arc of a rainbow.
I could explain perpendicular and parallel.
In my mind, I heard the wind in wild weeds. 

Visual poetry -- schemes with squares

Thanks to math teacher Sara Katz (at Manhattan's Essex Street Academy) 

and the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics for today's poem.

Visual poems with numbers

     I have a good friend who does not care for the sorts of poetry that are written today.  When I asked what he likes he cited "When I Was One-and-Twenty" by A E Housman (1859-1936) and the sonnet "Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822).   My own preferences in poems, on the other hand, are less certain.  I like to explore, to discover what new things may be said within new forms and constraints.  The following selection, "Notes on Numbers" by Richard Kostelanetz, introduces some of the ideas that this artist/writer/critic explores in his visual poetry -- with numbers -- examples of which are available through links offered at the end of this posting.

Notes on Numbers      by Richard Kostelanetz  

Counting (with sadness) in Syria

Burmese poet ko ko thett is an activist-scholar and, at present, a resident of Vienna, Austria. I became acquainted with his work through Kyi May Kaung, a writer, artist, Burma-activist-scholar, and friend who currently lives in the Washington, DC area. Here is a poem by ko ko thett  -- for Syria.

the 5000th    by ko ko thett

                        for syria

A mathematical woman

As in an earlier posting (20 December 2011), today's feature includes verse by Lord Byron (1788-1824). This time the source is Byron's satiric poem Don Juan. In Canto I, the poet describes Don Juan's mother, Donna Inez, as learned and "mathematical." Here are several stanzas about her -- sagely seasoned with words like "theorem," "proof," and "calculation."

Sonnet for Bolyai -- and translations

     The Hungarian mathematician János Bolyai (1802 – 1860) was one of the discoverers of non-Euclidean geometry — an axiomatization  that differs from Euclid's geometry in its stipulations concerning parallel lines. This discovery of  an alternative view of space -- that also was logically consistent -- helped to free mathematicians to explore new ideas, and the consequences developed by Einstein and others have led to far-reaching results.
     Hungarian poet Mihály Babits (1883-1941) wrote a sonnet about Bolyai.  I learned of this sonnet and its English translation (by Paul Sohar and offered below) from Osmo Pekonen, a Finnish mathematician who is engaged in the project of collecting translations of Babits' sonnet into as many languages as possible.  (The original Hungarian version -- along with a Spanish translation -- is available here.) 

     Bolyai      by Mihály Babits              translation into English by Paul Sohar

     God had imprisoned our minds in space.
     Those puny things have remained prisoners.
     Thought, the hungry bird of prey fought the curse,
     but never breached its diamond bars' embrace.  

Geometry of Trees

     Donna Masini, one of my poetry teachers at Hunter College, offered this rule of thumb for use of a particular word in a poem:  the word should serve the poem in (at least) two ways -- in meaning and sound, or sound and motion, or motion and image, or  . ..  .
     Richard Wilbur (1921 - ) is a former US Poet Laureate (1987-88), a prolific translator, and one of my favorite poets -- and perhaps this is because he seems to maximize his word-choices with multiple uses.  When I read Wilbur, I see and hear and feel -- and, after multiple readings, these sensory impressions coalesce into understanding.  Here is one of his sonnets, a poem of the geometry of absence:

One Idea May Hide Another . . .

     One of the excitements I find in both mathematics and poetry is the continuing discovery of new meaning.  A first reading discovers something but subsequent readings discover more and more.  A poem by Kenneth Koch (1925-2002), "One Train May Hide Another," opens with "In a poem, one line may hide another line" -- focusing also on the idea that one thought may obscure another.

     Koch's poem is one that I first met lots of years ago when I was working with middle school students in a poetry class at a newly established Children's Museum in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania.  At the time, the poem excited me by bringing back memories of traveling through western Pennsylvania as a child when my parents' car often needed to obey flashing red lights and stop while a train crossed our highway.  And sometimes there were parallel sets of tracks and the possibility that two trains might be passing our intersection in opposite directions at the same time. 

     I offer below the opening lines of the poem and a link to the complete poem; I post it with the hope that you also will enjoy it -- and will reflect on the ways that (in mathematics and elsewhere) one idea may hide -- or lead to -- another.   

Math and Poetry and Climate

Canadian poet Madhur Anand is also an Environmental Scientist; her love of nature and concerns for preserving a habitable climate pervade her work -- and she also scatters throughout it some mathematics.  You can imagine my delight when I found in her new collection (A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes) a poem (included below) that features the identity matrix.  Read on!

No Two Things Can Be More Equal    by Madhur Anand

In undergrad I learned about the identity 
matrix. Ones on the main diagonal and zeros 
elsewhere. Anything multiplied by it is itself.