I was introduced to Melbourne poet, novelist, and mathematician (he teaches at Victoria University of Technology), Tom Petsinis by South-African editor of Poetry-International, Liesl Jobson. Here from Petsinis' collection, Naming the Number (Penguin, 1998) is "Pascal's Tooth," (a poem also available at the Poetry-International site). In the grip of severe pain, Petsinis ponders the ideas of Pascal.
Sunday, September 15, 2013
Consider Pascal
I was introduced to Melbourne poet, novelist, and mathematician (he teaches at Victoria University of Technology), Tom Petsinis by South-African editor of Poetry-International, Liesl Jobson. Here from Petsinis' collection, Naming the Number (Penguin, 1998) is "Pascal's Tooth," (a poem also available at the Poetry-International site). In the grip of severe pain, Petsinis ponders the ideas of Pascal.
Monday, December 5, 2011
Poetic Pascal Triangle
Friday, February 23, 2024
Shaping poems with Pascal's Triangle
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:
Tuesday, January 16, 2024
Poetry at the Joint Mathematics Meetings
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.
Sunday, December 6, 2015
This blog (then and now) and Pascal
One thing that I have recently done is to update the blog's searchability --
in the right column you will find a search box.
Thursday, May 13, 2021
Mathematical Forms in Poetry . . .
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!
Wednesday, July 10, 2019
Euler's Vision -- in Verse
From "Euler's Vision" by Tom Petsinis |
Monday, October 25, 2010
Writing poetry like mathematics
Friday, December 11, 2015
Alphamath - poetry built on 4, 8
Thursday, January 2, 2014
2013 (and prior) -- titles, dates of posts
Dec 30 Error Message Haiku
Dec 26 The angel of numbers . . .
Dec 23 Ah, you are a mathematician
Dec 20 Measuring Winter
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
From 2011 -- dates, titles of posts
Scrolling through the 12 months of titles below may lead you to topics and poets/poems of interest. Also helpful may be the SEARCH box at the top of the right-hand column; there you may enter names or terms that you would like to find herein.
Dec 30 Good Numbers
Dec 26 A mathematical woman
Dec 22 Counting on Christmas
Dec 20 Thoughts Suggested by a College Examination
Dec 17 Ruth Stone counts
Dec 14 A puzzle with a partial solution
Dec 11 Poetry captures math student
Dec 8 Monsieur Probabilty
Dec 5 Poetic Pascal Triangle
Dec 2 Mathematics works with witchcraft
Saturday, January 2, 2016
2015 (and prior) -- titles, dates, links for posts
OR follow these year-number links to go to lists of posts through 2014, 2013, 2012 and 2011 -- and all the way back to March 2010 when this blog was begun. At the top of the column to the right is a SEARCH box for the blog and this link leads to a PDF file of searchable topics and names of poets and mathematicians presented herein. Scrolling down the right-hand column leads to a partial list of LABELS that are linked to a list of blogs that contain them.
Dec 31 Precision leads to poetry . . .
Dec 28 Can a woman learn science (or mathematics)?
Dec 24 And now welcome Christmas . . .
Dec 22 Let us not forget . . .
Dec 20 Who put the pie in Pythagoras?
Dec 18 A student writes poetry for a math class . . .
Dec 15 Generalized Pythagorean Theorem--a visual poem?
Monday, April 3, 2017
Math-Stat Awareness Month -- find a poem!
AND
National Poetry Month!
Celebrate with a MATHY POEM, found here in this blog! Scroll down!
Mar 28 Split this Rock, Freedom Plow Award, April 21
Mar 27 Math-themed poems at Poets.org
Mar 23 Remember Emmy Noether!
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
An algorithm shapes a poem
Tuesday, January 16, 2018
Blog history -- title, links for previous posts . . .
Scroll through the titles below, browsing to find items of interest
among the more-than-nine-hundred postings since March 2010
OR
Click on any label -- a list is found in the right-hand column below the author profile
OR
Enter term(s) in the SEARCH box -- and find all posts containing those terms.
For example, here is a link to the results of a SEARCH using math women
And here is a link to a poem by Brian McCabe that celebrates math-woman Sophie Germain.
This link reaches a poem by Joan Cannon that laments her math-anxiety.
This poem expresses some of my own divided feelings.
Tuesday, January 3, 2017
December 2016 (and prior) -- titles, dates of posts
Dec 31 Happy New Year! -- Resolve to REWARD WOMEN!
Dec 27 Celebrate Vera Rubin -- a WOMAN of science!
Dec 26 Post-Christmas reflections from W. H. Auden
Dec 19 Numbers for Christmas . . .
Dec 15 Remembering Thomas Schelling (1921-2016)
Dec 12 When one isn't enough ... words from a Cuban poet