X

# Posts

### October 20, 2014

+
Last week the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) had a special program honoring Martin Gardner (1914-2010); tomorrow (October 21) is the 100th anniversary of his birth.   The shelving in the MAA meeting room displayed copies of many of Gardner's approximately one hundred books.  However, none of the books displayed were books of poetry and, indeed, Gardner referred to himself as "an occasional versifier" but not a poet.  Nonetheless he helped to […]

### October 15, 2014

+
You are invited to a poetry reading sponsored by the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics at the 2015 Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM)Gonzalez Convention Center   Room 205  San Antonio, TexasSunday, January 11, 2015, 5:30 - 7:00 p.m.      All poets who write of mathematics and all who are interested in mathematical poetry are invited. Join the gathering to share poems and to enjoy the company of like-minded poetic-math people!  The reading is […]
+
No-Rules NASCAR If you stripped away all the rules of car racing and had a contest which was simply to get a human being around a track 200 times as fast as possible, what strategy would win? Let's say the racer has to survive. Hunter Freyer About 90 minutes. There are lots of ways you could build your vehicle—an electric car,[1]With wheels designed to dig into the pavement on turns. a rocket sled, or a carriage that runs along a rail on the track—but in each case, it's pretty […]

### October 10, 2014

+
Sometimes good lines fit so well into their poems that their individual merits go unrecognized.  And then, taken out of context, they can lead lives of their own.  Here is a start for a collection of such lines.From Poets.org here are two lines from "Ceriserie" by Joshua Clover:           Mathematics: Everyone rolling dice and flinging Fibonacci, going to the opera, counting everything.       Fire: The number […]
+
Here’s an interesting question. Given the side of a triangle with integer length, what is the set of all points in the plane for which the other two sides will also have integer lengths? And by interesting, I mean that the answer wasn’t immediately obvious to me. So I drew a segment 5 units long […]

### October 08, 2014

+
It turns out that one of the disadvantages of a long-term blog with lots of worthy material is that sometimes I lose track of fine work that I want to post.  And sometimes I find it again.  This morning I came across this poem by California conservationist Richard Retecki.     Love Physics     by Richard Retecki     equal forces     oppositely directed     canceled to zero  […]
+
Into the Sun When I was about 8 years old, shoveling snow on a freezing day in Colorado, I wished that I could be instantly transported to the surface of the Sun, just for a nanosecond, then instantly transported back. I figured this would be long enough to warm me up but not long enough to harm me. What would actually happen? AJ, Kansas City Believe it or not, this wouldn't even warm you. The temperature of the surface of the Sun is about 5,800 K,[1]Or °C. When temperatures start […]

### October 04, 2014

+
Poems affect our spirits as well as our minds. And Split This Rock is looking for poems that protest and witness, world-changing poems.  Go here for information about their Eighth Annual Poetry Contest (with submission deadline November 1, 2014).     Here in this blog, as I present connections between poetry and mathematics, I provide some poems of protest and advocacy.  I advocate attention to problems of climate change -- to keep our […]
+
Scroll down to find titles and dates of posts in 2014.  At the bottom is a links to lists of posts through  2013 and 2012 and 2011 -- and all the way back to March 2010 when this blog was begun.   This link leads to a PDF file that lists searchable topics and names of poets and mathematicians presented herein. Sept 28  Journal of Math in the Arts features PoetrySept 23  Clearing the Air with a PoemSept 20  Marching for ClimateSept 15  […]

### October 02, 2014

+
I had some fun weeks collaborating with Kyoko who runs the fabulous Link Collective. Now we both are super-proud to present two geometric textile designs: Contemporary graphics traditionally hand-printed on awesome fabrics in Japan. Both designs are available in two sizes: a larger scarf that doubles as a bag or wrapping, and a smaller size for using it as a pocket square. So there is some geometric fashion statement for both ladies and gents! See it all on the Link Collective website ⟶

### October 01, 2014

+
Antimatter What if everything was antimatter, EXCEPT Earth? Sean Gallagher This one doesn't end well for us. But—unlike most scenarios involving the word "antimatter"—the end is surprisingly slow and drawn-out. The whole universe is matter, as far as we can tell. No one is sure why there's more antimatter than matter, since the laws of physics are pretty symmetrical, and so there's no reason to expect there to be more of one than the other.[1]Although when it […]

### September 28, 2014

+
The Golden Rule of Food Shopping: Never shop for groceries when you’re hungry. Corollary for Mattress Shopping: Never shop for a mattress when you’re tired. When buying a mattress, Consumer Reports recommends that you lie down on “lots of mattresses” in the store and spend at least 15 minutes on each mattress — five minutes lying on […]
+
A special issue of the Journal of Mathematics and the Arts entitled "Poetry and Mathematics" is now available online at this link.  An introduction by guest editor Sarah Glaz is available (for free download) here.   In this opening piece, one of the items that Glaz includes her own translation of a math-puzzle poem from Bhaskara's (1114-1185) Lilavati that is charming.  I offer it here:        Ten times the square root of a […]

### September 24, 2014

+
Visit Every State How fast could you visit all 50 states? —as discussed by Stephen Von Worley on Data Pointed This week's article is a little different. Instead of answering one of your questions, I'm going to look at someone else's answer to a question, and how thinking about that answer raised some new questions of my own. Eventually, the whole thing sucked me down a rabbit hole of calculations from which I barely escaped. In the summer of 2012, the blog Twelve Mile Circle […]

### September 23, 2014

+
Every poem has a climate -- a collection of emotional tones that overlay and underlay its words. Today -- as the U.N. meets in NY to discuss the future climate of our planet -- I have been looking for mathy poems with a climate of advocacy, verses that let the world know that we must, soon and vigorously, take action to keep our earth habitable.      One of the things I found is a poem (involving a couple of numbers and mathy words) by Simon […]

### September 22, 2014

+
Old farts will know the answer to this old trivia question: What two letters do not appear on a phone? And if your phone still looked like this… then it would be a reasonable question. But phones don’t look like that anymore. They look like this… in which case, it’s a really dumb question. (The Q […]

### September 21, 2014

+
Today I want to call attention to the growing global concern about climate change accentuated by the United Nations Climate Summit that opens September 23. Tomorrow (September 21) I will travel on a 6 AM bus  from Silver Spring to NYC to be part of the People's Climate March.  It is said that more than 500 buses of protesters are heading to New York. 29 marching bands will provide the soundtrack. 26 city blocks are being cordoned off for the march's […]

### September 19, 2014

+
A ditloid is a puzzle in which a fact must be discerned from the numbers and abbreviated letters in the clue. For example, 7 D in a W is a ditloid for “7 Days in a Week,” and 20 V on a D is a ditloid for “20 Vertices on a Dodecahedron.” Here’s a ditloid in honor of International Talk Like […]

### September 17, 2014

+
Balloon Car My 12-year-old daughter is proposing an interesting project. She is planning to attach a number of helium balloons to a chair, which in turn would be tethered by means of a rope to a Ferrari. Her 13-year-old friend would then drive the Ferrari around, while she sits in the chair enjoying uninterrupted views of the countryside. Leaving aside the legal and insurance difficulties, my daughter is keen to know the maximum speed that she could expect to attain, and how many helium […]

### September 15, 2014

+
Lee Lorch was a mathematician known for his social activism on behalf of black Americans as well as for his mathematics. He died in February of this year in Toronto, at age 98.  A life-long communist and a life-long crusader.  Last Thursday I attended a memorial service  (organized by Joe Auslander, a poetry-lover who one day had introduced me to the work of Frank Dux) for Lorch -- sponsored by the Mathematical Association for America and held at the MAA […]
+
Before reading 365 Things That Make You Go Hmmm…, I hadn’t realized that I’d been on Earth for 1.3 billion seconds, and I never thought about what someone would feel like after spending a day in my mind. That’s the beauty of this incredible book — it asks you to think about things that you’ve probably […]

### September 11, 2014

+
One of my favorite mathy poets is Halifax mathematician Robert Dawson -- his work is complex and inventive, and fun to puzzle over.  Dawson's webpage at St Mary's University lists his mathematical activity; his poetry and fiction are available in several issues of the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics and in several postings for this blog (15 April 2012,  30 November 2013, 2 March 2014) and in various other locations findable by […]
+
To show my sons what Siri can do, I asked her (it?) the following question: What is 6 + 4? Siri told me, “The answer is 10.” But she also provided a bunch of other information pulled from Wolfram Alpha, including the following data: This data appears to be taken from dissertation research by B. A. Fierman which […]

### September 08, 2014

+
All of the following jokes were borrowed from Reader’s Digest, which I’m sure they borrowed from elsewhere. Did you hear about the mathematician who’s afraid of negative numbers? He’ll stop at nothing to avoid them. How easy is it to count in binary? It’s as easy as 01 10 11. A Roman walks into the […]

### September 07, 2014

+
We computer-screen readers all know hypertext; when we read along in Wikipedia or some other online document and come across an underlined term whose font color is light blue -- at such a point we may decide to keep on reading as if we had not noticed the light blue "hyperlink," or we may locate our cursor on that text, click our mouse, and link to a new screen of visual information.     My first encounter with hypertext poetry was the work of Stephanie […]

### September 05, 2014

+
When my college roommate contracted crabs, he went to CVS to buy some lice cream. As you can imagine, he didn’t want to announce to the world what he was buying or why, so he put the box on the counter with a notepad, a bottle of aspirin, a pack of cigarettes, a bag of […]

### September 03, 2014

+
Publishing a blog about poetry and mathematics brings me new connections -- it is not unusual for a day to begin with an email from another poetry-math enthusiast who wants to share a link or a poem. One of these is retired USC biochemist Paul Geiger.        Using as raw material a poem by Shel Silverstein, Geiger created a 9x9 syllable-square:S.C.S. STOUT     by Paul Geiger       Apologizing and Acknowledging Shel […]
+
Scroll down to find titles and dates of posts in 2014.  At the bottom is a links to lists of posts through  2013 and 2012 and 2011 -- and all the way back to March 2010 when this blog was begun.   This link leads to a PDF file that lists searchable topics and names of poets and mathematicians presented herein.  Aug 30  Mathy Poetry from Bridges 2014Aug 27  Grandma Got STEMAug 23  Changing colors, counting syllablesAug 19  Poetry in Math JournalsAug […]

### September 02, 2014

+
Do you know what the following graph represents? Sine on the dotted line. If you tell that joke to the right audience, you’ll likely hear a triggle. (If you tell it to the wrong audience, you’ll likely hear the sound of tomatoes whizzing past your head.) Triggle is a portmanteau, a combination of two or […]
+
All the Money People sometimes say "If I had all the money in the world ..." in order to discuss what they would do if they had no financial constraints. I'm curious, though, what would happen if one person had all of the world's money? Daniel Pino So you've somehow found a way to gather all the world's money. We won't worry about how you did it—let's just assume you invented some kind of money-summoning magic spell. Physical currency—coins and […]