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Celebrate Math-Women with Poems!

March 6, 2019, 7:13 am
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March is Women's History Month!
March 8 is International Women's Day!
and here in this blog we celebrate math-women with poems!

Herein appear lots of poems featuring women in math and the SEARCH box in the right-column may help you find them. To find a list of useful search terms, scroll down the right-hand column.   For example, here is a link to a selection of poems found using the pair of search terms "women  equal."   AND, here are links to several poems to get you started:
A poem by Brian McCabe about Sophie Germain;
a poem by Eavan Boland about Grace Murray Hopper;    
a poem by Carol Dorf about Ada Lovelace;
a poem of mine about Sofia Kovalevsky;
a poem of mine about Emmy Noether.
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Celebrate Pi-Day on 3.14

March 11, 2019, 7:21 am
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     If you are in the Washington, DC area you are cordially invited to a poetry-math program at The Writer's Center on Thursday evening, March 14, at 7 PM-- come and enjoy exploring connections between POETRY and PI.
This link leads to earlier posts in this blog that celebrate PI.
. . . And, when you can find time . . .
 Say a text, a smart statement, in Pilish! 
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An Interview of/by a Mathy Poet

March 13, 2019, 6:58 am
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     University of Connecticut mathematician-poet Sarah Glaz has interviewed me on behalf of the Journal of Mathematics and the Arts.  The article Sarah wrote is now available online -- but the online version requires a costly subscription.  I offer instead this link to a pdf file of her "Artist Interview: JoAnne Growney."  The article gives some of my personal and mathematical history -- growing up on a farm, studying mathematics because of a scholarship, loving both poetry and math and eventually finding time to follow both interests and see their connections.  And it includes some poems. I invite you to follow this link and browse a bit!  
Thank you, Sarah!
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Looking back . . . titles, links to previous posts

March 18, 2019, 5:26 am
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How to Triumph Like a Girl -- Learn to Swagger!!!

March 19, 2019, 10:33 am
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     A recent article in the Washington Postcited the discrimination faced by women in economics.  In response, I can't resist offering Ada Limon's poem, "How to Triumph Like a Girl" -- its mathematical connections include a defiant spirit and two numbers.   Let us begin to win!

How to Triumph Like a Girl     by Ada Limón

I like the lady horses best,
how they make it all look easy,
like running 40 miles per hour
is as fun as taking a nap, or grass.
I like their lady horse swagger,
after winning. Ears up, girls, ears up! . . .

Read the rest here to Poets.org.
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Give HER your support

March 25, 2019, 9:53 am
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                     In school, many
                     gifted math girls.
                     Later, so few
                     famed math women!

Thank you to Math Horizons (edited by Dave Richeson) for recent publication of "Give HER Your Support" -- a collection of syllable-square stanzas (one of which is given above) that focus on math-women.  Online access to the article is available here -- andthis link leads to a PDF of the article that I have downloaded and made available from my website.
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From a Greek Nobelist . . .

March 27, 2019, 8:00 am
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     Poet Odysseus Elytis (1911-1996) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1979.  At some time I purchased a copy of The Collected Poems of Odysseus Elytis (translated by Jeffrey Carson and Nicos Sarris, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998) and recently, during a reorganization of my bookshelves, have picked it up again.  His poetry is not easy for me to read but I have been drawn to explore the collection, Marie Nephele, which Carson's introduction tells us was more than fifteen years in the writing.  It is "arranged in three sections of twice seven poems with an introductory and closing poem and two intermediary songs ... ."  Half of the poems are in the voice of a youthful Maria and half in the voice of the poet, "the Antiphonist."  
     Throughout his verse, Elytis is not shy about using mathematical terminology.  Some samples: 

From "The Song of Maria Nepele":

       SUPERSTITION BROUGHT TO A MATHEMATICAL CLARITY WOULD HELP US PERCEIVE THE DEEPER STRUCTURE OF THE WORLD.
Read more »
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Poetry-Mathematics--at Poets House--March 28

March 27, 2019, 10:02 am
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       Tomorrow evening, March 28, 7 PM at Poets House in NYC, Emily Grosholz, poet and philosopher of mathematics, will discuss her new book, Great Circles: The Transits of Mathematics and Poetry, (Springer, 2018).  Her book thoughtfully links the way poets use mathematical entities and mathematicians use poetic “figures of thought.”  To illustrate, here are the opening stanzas of Grozholz's poem "Holding Pattern" -- a villanelle that she offers in her consideration (Chapter 7) of periodicity and symmetry. 

from Holding Pattern    by Emily Rolfe Grosholz

        We can't remember half of what we know. 
        They hug each other and then turn away.
        One thinks in silence, never let me go.

        The sky above the airport glints with snow
        That melts beneath the laws it must obey.
        We can't remember half of what we know.  
                 .  .  .

For the complete poem, go to Chapter 7 pages 115-116 of Great Circles or to Grosholz's collection, The Stars of Earth (Word Galaxy, 2017).
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Celebrate Karen Uhlenbeck, Abel Prize winner

March 29, 2019, 6:30 am
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     Celebration is everywhere (including here in The New Yorker ) -- mathematician Karen Uhlenbeck has recently won the Abel prize for her revolutionary work: " . . . pioneering achievements in geometric partial differential equations, gauge theory and integrable systems, and for the fundamental impact of her work on analysis, geometry, and mathematical physics."
     Here (pulled from The New Yorker article also cited above) are some of Uhlenbeck's poetic words about women in mathematics:

       It's really hard for me to describe
          to people who are not somewhat near me in age
       what it was like for women then ... and it was only
          because of the women's movement and books like  
Read more »
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"Science Friday" welcomes National Poetry Month

April 2, 2019, 6:05 am
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Last week, NPR's program "Science Friday" anticipated National Poetry Month and offered a list of poems with links to science.    One of these is "Algorhyme" by Radia Perlman -- 

                          a pioneer in computer science
                                 and while she worked
                                 her mind gave her a poem . . .

from   Algorhyme    by Radia Perlman

               I think that I shall never see
               A graph more lovely than a tree.
               A tree whose crucial property
               Is loop-free connectivity.
                    .  .  .

Perlman's complete poem is available here.  Another of the poetry suggestions made by Science Friday is "Planetarium" by Adrienne Rich -- a poem that honors astronomer Caroline Herschel (1750-1848) and posted here in this blog.

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The Kingdom of Mathematics

April 4, 2019, 7:44 am
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     When I was a mathematics professor at Pennsylvania's Bloomsburg University, one of the colleagues whom I much admired and enjoyed is Reza Noubary.  This mathematician-statistician also writes poetry -- and I have been lucky to have him share it with me.  Here, below, are four of his small poems, "Math Kingdom."

       Math Kingdom     by Reza Noubary

       Mathematics has its own kingdom
       The key to enter it is called wisdom

              Some fear mathematics for its complexity
              Others enjoy it for its truth and explicitly
              For me it is the beauty, elegance and simplicity
              For the world it is the usefulness and necessity     
Read more »
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A Theorem in Limerick Form

April 8, 2019, 6:05 am
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     Going through a pile of saved clippings, I came across an article in the April 2014 issue of Math Horizons that involved humorous restating of mathematical theorems -- one of them, shown below, restated the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic in limerick form.  Enjoy!

           Fundamental Theorem of a Limerick

          Any number you pick, I dare say,
          When factored in any old way,
          Results in some primes,
          Together with times,
          Unique up to order.  Hooray!

Entitled "Bovino-Weierstrass and Other Fractured Theorems," this article by Matt Koetz, Heather A. Lewis, and Mark McKinzie is found online here.
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Poetry with NEGATIVE numbers

April 10, 2019, 3:14 am
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     In October of 2018, I was reminded of the significant achievements of poet and playwright, Ntozake Shange (1948-2018) as I read her obituary in the WashingtonPost.  Shange wrote with daring and with vivid imagery -- and often used numbers very effectively, as in this poem, "With No Immediate Cause."  I present its opening lines; the complete poem may be found here at poemhunter.com.

          With No Immediate Cause     by Ntozake Stange

          every 3 minutes a woman is beaten
          every five minutes a
          woman is raped/every ten minutes
          a lil girl is molested   
Read more »
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If I had a million lives to live . . .

April 15, 2019, 6:10 am
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     This posting features Carl Sandburg's "Humdrum," a poem that reflects on "million."  (This poem and others by Sandburg may be found online at poets.org -- at this vast resource-site also is a collection of poems with math-themes.)  For me, Sandburg was the poet who introduced the idea that lines can be poetic without having rhyme.  (This link leads to several of my previous Sandburg-postings.)

       Humdrum     by  Carl Sandburg  (1878-1967)

       If I had a million lives to live
          and a million deaths to die
          in a million humdrum worlds,

       I’d like to change my name
          and have a new house number to go by   
Read more »
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Some of the Magic of THREE

April 17, 2019, 11:11 am
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The Universe in Verse -- an Earth-Day celebration of Science and Poetry
A NYC event on April 23 -- learn more here!

     In her brain-pickings website, Maria Popova offers myriad links between science and poetry -- and one of the poems she has, to my delight, reminded me of is "Renascence" by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950).  Here is the first stanza:

 from    Renascence  by Edna St. Vincent Millay

          All I could see from where I stood
          Was three long mountains and a wood;
          I turned and looked another way,
          And saw three islands in a bay.
          So with my eyes I traced the line
          Of the horizon, thin and fine,
          Straight around till I was come
          Back to where I’d started from;
          And all I saw from where I stood
          Was three long mountains and a wood.
              . . .

Millay goes on to speak of flat and wide, of spheres and Infinity . . .. a story related to the poems is available here and the entire poem is found here at PoetryFoundation.org.
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Poems in support of Earth Day

April 22, 2019, 5:21 am
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     These words come from an editorial by Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post in September of 2018.

          Public awareness
          and pressure are
          the best hope
          for effective
          climate
          action.

This link leads to postings -- and poems -- in this blog related to CLIMATE.
And here is a link to several previous EARTH DAY postings..

A  fine source for lots more climate information is the Center for Mathematics and the Environment at the University of Exeter.   Another is 350.org -- which offers 350 poems of 3.5 lines each at this link; these poems came as part of a call for climate action for October 24, 2009.  Alas, it is ten years later and we have not answered the call.

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Zero plus anything is . . .

April 24, 2019, 8:02 am
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     Poet Jane Hirshfield is an award-winning poet, essayist and translator whose work and I admire and enjoy.  In her collections I have found a thoughtful share of poems with links to mathematics -- and links to my previous postings of her work may be found here.  The MATH theme collection at poets.org has led me to another of her poems and I offer its opening stanzas here:

     Zero Plus Anything Is a World     by Jane Hirshfield

     Four less one is three.

     Three less two is one.

     One less three
     is what, is who,
     remains.     
Read more »
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Al-gorithms . . . conform or suffer?

April 29, 2019, 7:08 am
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     Thanks to poet/mathematician Scott Williams who alerted me to this work by "a good poet and friend" Stephen Lewandowski, a retired conservation worker and author of 14 books (for example, One Foot) with another on the way.  Steve says this of his poem:  "SPELL" exists because I fear the misuse of algorithms to standardize people . . ."

A SPELL AGAINST AL-GORITHMS     by Stephen Lewandowski

Named for a man, Abu Ja-far Muhammed ibn Musa,
and the Persian city Khwarizma where he lived
in the year 800, pursuing calculations
arithmetical and al-gebraical.

Begins admirably as
“how to solve a class of problems” and
proceeds through disambiguation to specification by
massaging a mass of data.
If the data are people, then
the massage is called a “census.”  
Read more »
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PLAY with math words . . . find a poem

April 30, 2019, 6:35 am
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A few days ago -- playing with math words -- I found this.


Here's a link to SEARCH results for this blog's presentations of "visual" poetry
and this link leads to information about the 
 NATIONAL MATHEMATICS FESTIVAL 
in Washington, DC this coming Saturday, May 4.
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Celebrating math teachers

May 6, 2019, 1:34 pm
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  This week (May 6-10) is 
   
  US Teacher Appreciation Week 2019  
    
  Celebrate your teachers with poems!  
   
This link leads to lots of previously-posted poems about math teachers.

Here is a sample (remembering my high school math teacher, Laura Church):
Read more »
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