Articles that link math and poetry . . .
Below I offer links to two articles that I rediscovered recently. The first is a National Geographic Education Blog posting from 2018, "How Math and Poetry Intersect" (an article for which I found...
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Personalities in Mathematics . . .
For those of us who spend time in the World of Mathematics, numbers and other mathematical objects often develop personalities. Previous posts have featured poems by the French poet, Guillevic,...
View Article"My number is . . ."
More than twenty years ago I found and admired Montana poet Sandra Alcosser's poem, "My Number" (included in Except by Nature, Graywolf, 1998) -- and I included it in a small anthology, Numbers and...
View ArticleThe Cube of the Rainbow
Later this week a scheduled screening (in nearby Takoma Park, MD) of a film about Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) has prompted me to return to some rereading of Dickinson's verse -- which is...
View ArticleMath modeling is poetry . . .
Jennifer Pazour is a professor the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Rensselaer Polytecnic Institute and is, like me, a blogger. Recently I discovered in her blog this 2014...
View ArticleUsing poetry to open dialogues with science . . .
Recently I have obtained a copy of Sam Illingworth's book, A Sonnet to Science: scientists and their poetry (Manchester University Press, 2019) -- a collection of essays-with-poems that features...
View ArticleSmall and large -- poetic views . . .
A favorite on my bookshelves isThe Book of Disquiet: the Complete Edition by Fernando Pessoa*. Here is a math-poetic item from this "diary" by Pessoa: In a discussion about how a village may...
View ArticlePoems and Primes
Recently Press 53 offered a "Prime 53 Poem" poetry challenge -- to write a poem meeting these conditions: · Total syllable count of 53 · Eleven total lines · First...
View ArticlePlaying with permutations of the nouns of a poem
Founded in 1960, OULIPO (short for French: Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) has been active in the exploration of the effects of constraints or arbitrary rules in the production of...
View ArticleA pleasing permutation of lines -- the Villanelle
A villanelle is a 19-line French verse form -- with lines divided into five three-line stanzas and a final quatrain -- a poem in which the first and third lines each appear four times. This...
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Celebrate Halloween with counting rhymes . . .
Halloween, Halloween, strangest sights I've ever seen . . .Three Little WitchesOne little, two little, three little witchesFly over haystacks, fly over ditches, Read more »
View ArticleMath-Poetry at JMM in Denver --January 2020
Deadline, November 12 -- Math-Poetry Contest for Colorado studentsMore details here in this blog-posting and here at the American Mathematical Society website.Winners will read at the 2020 Joint...
View ArticleWeaving mathematics into poetry . . .
José Alan Esparza Lozano is from the border region of Ciudad Juárez, México and El Paso, Texas -- and traveled to Cambridge, Massachusetts where he graduated in 2019 from MIT with a BS in...
View ArticleTry it -- you'll like it -- write an ACROSTIC poem!
When solving problems in mathematics, the constraints that are imposed on the solution often are helpful in solving it. As a simple example, if we are given the lengths of the two shorter sides...
View ArticleMathematics -- something useful ... or beautiful ...
I offer a sample below from a poem by Jane Hirshfield entitled "Mathematics" and invite you to go here to read the entire poem -- and to reflect on it. What does the poem say that is true about...
View ArticleConnecting mathematics to a larger world . . .
I begin with words from a former student -- a postal worker who had retired early and went back to school to become a primary-school teacher: I will teach...
View ArticleMultiplication is vexation ... the rule of three, etc.
There are lots of childhood rhymes that celebrate the use of numbers -- here is a sample (found at this website) -- the "Rule of Three" also is the subject of an interesting article by Ben...
View ArticleThe Poet of Number -- syllables counted by primes
Margaret Zheng is a first-year student at Haverford College -- with interests that include mathematics (see page 2 at this link) and music and philosophy and poetry . . . Margaret was a finalist...
View ArticleI am THANKFUL for . . . mathematics, poetry . . .
Today as I am preparing for Thanksgiving -- with its guests and travel and remembering -- my thoughts have turned back to Carl Sandburg (1878-1967), one of the first American poets whose work I came to...
View ArticleDogs Know . . . Mathematics
A mathematics/statistics education researcher who writes both poetry and song lyrics -- who writes these often and well -- is Lawrence "Larry" Lesser, professor at The University of Texas at El...
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