The math-po (and sci-po) stream keeps flowing. Math Mama Writes, who started the whole math-poetry movement has some more on her blog, and here is Erin Nash with some really beautiful biological poetry. And of course, here’s her husband Sean Nash having his students writing poetry too. Of course let’s not forget my daughter Shreya (who sort of started this whole thing) and her sci-po’s at her blog Uniquely Mine.
Below are some thoughts about math-poetry – but you can ignore all that and scroll right down to the poem: The infinity of primes!
Through all this I have been plugging away at my math poetry. I know the original challenge was to write something to motivate students to learn math (and I did write one along those lines). But more interesting to me has been this theme I have picked up, which is of writing proofs as poetry. I know many people have described mathematics in poetic terms but I am trying something slightly different here. I am trying to explain theorems (as in these couple of instances, see here, here, here and here) and speficially in the poem included below, I am actually trying to construct a mathematical proof in rhyming verse.
I recently received an email from a teacher in Poland, seeking advice for a curriculum outline for their Design Technology Section. They said, and I quote:
Unfortunately, I have minimal experience with the subject as a teacher or as a student in my younger years, consequently, I have little background as to what a DT class should look like.
As you might guess I’m struggling trying to put together some sort of DT curriculum for our Middle School.
Our small school does not not have any kind of fabrication equipment so our DT class is currently heavy on IT design aspects….(web design, research on a topic and devise a solution, book creation,etc… )
The specific request was for”some useful and practical information that I can implement fairly easily.”
Sean had this wonderful post on his blog (Is this a sluggish strategy?) about this whole scientific and mathematical poetry that is going around. He links to some excellent sci-po’s written by his students (see Pushing Scientific Thought Into Art) and also provides a nice protocol for those who want to apply it in their own classrooms.
It is amazing to me just how this idea has spread. It has en-livened my life, I can say that much. Anyway, I wanted to say thanks to Sean (and his students) – and what better way to say it than in verse. So here is: For Sean & his students
A point outside a circle,
shoots out two lines
one heading for the center
the other more feline
smoothly kisses the curve
That delicate swerve
of the ball and then, abruptly
turns to the center,
making an angle
and meets the first
which went on straight
To thus form a triangle.
The angle formed by the tangent
And the other line, the radius
the mathematical mind sees
is exactly 90 degrees!
And funnily enough, it doesn’t matter
where the initial point is, the starter
Where ever it may be
(as long as it is outside the circumference)
The angle will always be 90!
Did that make sense?
A poem on the fact that a tangent to a circle is perpendicular to the radius drawn to the point of tangency. See image below
I guess ’tis the season of Math-Po’s! Sue VanHattum, whose challenge started all this, commented on my recent Math-Po (Math-Po (Mathematical Poetry): Goldbach’s Conjecture) by providing an example of her own writing, a poem titled Imaginary Numbers Do the Trick. That piece so inspired me that I spent the next hour (and a good part of a faculty meeting), writing one on the same idea. A close read of both these poems (hers and mine) will reveal that I was more than inspired… some phrases and words from Sue’s work insinuated themselves into my pre-frontal cortex and ended up in my poems. As they say, plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery. Read, The Mathematical i, after the cartoon…
My previous post (Poetry, Science & Math, OR why I love the web) mentioned a challenge by Sue VanHattum of “Math Mama Writes” to “write a little kids’ poem … and that tells of the beauty of math, or, that mentions math and challenge, both in a positive way.” Well, I got inspired and took a part of my lunch break today to write something up. I am not sure it technically fits Sue’s challenge but here it is none the less. [If you are interested in learning more about the history and mathematics behind Goldbach's Conjecture, one of the oldest unsolved problems in mathematics, check Goldbach's Conjecture on Wikipedia.]
Goldbach’s Conjecture
Goldbach, a mathematician, serious and stern
Many years ago noticed a pattern
He wrote, to Euler, the math genius
Here is something, he said, to excite us!
I have seen, he scribbled, with my imagination
That every even digit
(except two, which doesn’t fit)
Can be broken into a partition
Of two primes which add
To the original even digit
(Now, Euler, don’t fidget!)
But isn’t that totally rad!
Now since that day this simple thesis
Remains just that, a hypothesis
Forcing number lovers to lose their slumber
As they try to prove, primes in pairs can add up to any even number.
(Two is the exception, as we said before
Which is, come to think of it, a bit of a bore).
You can see an original of the letter that Goldbach wrote to Euler at mathisgoodforyou.com.
A 5th grade science assignment, transformed. A rant about Mother Goose. A math poetry challenge! How did that come to be? And what does that have to do with loving the Interwebs? Read on…
I had written earlier about how my 10 year-old daughter had been writing poems on science (Scientific Poems or Sci-Po’s for short). It all started with an extra-credit assignment she needed to do for her science class, and a need, I perceived, to keep her blog (Uniquely Mine) up-to-date. She has quite a few written now. For instance here is one about a news item about scientists finding dinosaur eggs (and other dino-stuff) in India (Cluster of dinosaur eggs found in southern India), and here’s the poem:
I had written earlier about the idea of “postdictable” which was defined as something that is “surprising initially, but then understandable with a bit of thought.” It lies at the spot between predictability and total chaos. The movie Sixth Sense is postdictable in the best sense of the world. Good teaching I believe needs to be postdictable. That is what keeps us engaged, keeps us waiting for more, the payoff as it were. And best of all, once all the pieces are in, we can’t wait to go back and review everything again, to see just how beautifully the whole thing holds together. There is a strong aesthetic component to this – a sense of wholeness, closure, elegance, and inevitability. Good poems have this quality, as do mathematical theorems. A well crafted lecture or a lesson plan has this quality as well. In my mind these ideas are closely tied to the Dewey’s idea of experience and to the idea of design. Hopefully I will have a chance to explore these connections in a later post but for now, here are a couple of commercials that I think were postdictable in a really cool kind of way. Read the rest of this entry »
Shreya, my daughter has a blog, Uniquely Mine. An RSS feed from her blog can be found right here (just scroll down and see the right column). Anyway, over the past few weeks she has been doing something for extra credit for the science class. Her fifth-grade teacher has asked all students to find stories related to science in the newspaper, create a short writeup about it to share with the other children. I asked her to add another layer of challenge to that. Once she has her report all typed up, she needs to write a short poem about it and post it to her blog.
I asked her to do this partly because I was concerned that she would not be able to keep up her blog once school started. As most people she was very excited to have a blog and wrote a bunch of stuff for it in the beginning. Then life began to take over and her postings grew few and far in between. What was needed, I figured, was a way to keep her writing regularly. So this idea of piggybacking on something she was already doing. The poems she writes are often short and it didn’t seem like much of an imposition to ask her to write little poems based on the science articles she has been finding for her school report.
Well, so far so good. She has a quite a bit of writing (mostly poems) in a genre we have decided to call Sci-Po a.k.a. Scientific Poems! (It’s a obvious ripp-off on the term Sci-Fi). It has also been a lot of fun.
When we first set up the blog, I advised her to not allow commenting. I was not sure what kinds of comments she would generate and it just seemed as if we were asking for trouble (especially exposing a 10 year old to the kind of junk that is prevalent on the Internet). However, after much consideration we finally decided to open up her site and allow people to comment. So if you read this blog, click over to her site and drop her a note. Please, remember this is a 10 year old so be polite Of course all comments are moderated so I still hope to protect her from some of the nastier aspects of the world (not that I can do that forever but at least I can try).
Anyway, check out her writing. I think you will like it. Here is my favorite. It is a non-sense poem (not a Sci-Po but fun none-the-less) titled, Salt’n Pepa in Santa Fe. Here is is:
Salt’n Pepa in Santa Fe by Shreya Mishra
Squigles-squagles, pinchley pooh
Slip’n sliding on my shoe
Dimpo-doby dorkly dake
Gently eat the slice of cake
Shickly-bumbly rabbity-red
Back at home, tucked in bed
My daughter, whose creative exploits have been featured here before (for instance see her design for a math-music game), now has a blog, titled Uniquely Mine. It features original writing (poems, stories) by her. Do check it out. You can find regular updates on this blog via the beauty of RSS feeds on the right column (just scroll down).
The one piece by Shreya I would like to draw attention to is a story titled Obtuse can be right. She wrote this as a part of a fourth grade assignment, and it is pretty cool, with interesting geometry-related wordplay. Enjoy.
My friend Gaurav Bhatnagar (whose doggerel on ambigrams is featured on my blog as well) gave it high praise in his Facebook update, saying, “This is a masterpiece. Highly recommender (sic!). As good as Asimov’s short shorts.” I haven’t had a chance to see Asimov’s short shorts but I guess they are cool!
Yesterday I had blogged about poems written by the year I students at the Plymouth MAET program. Today I spent time with the 2nd year cohort and this is what they came up with. Enjoy.
There once was a hidden tiger in all,
at times it will make you think you’ll fall.
Many ideas, down to one,
novel, effective, whole, fun.
With Punya’s help we’ll answer the call - Michelle, Johnny, Eliza, Lauren
There once was an idea called TPACK
but it wasn’t just about looking back
move forward and create
your teaching will be great
Relax, Repose, Reteach lessons do not lack
include NEW ideas, add a sixth line, LIMERACK! - Sean Sweeney, Rawad Bou Hamdan, Alfred McDonnell
I started the class with amnesia,
Became totally engrossed in fantasia,
Found myself steeped in inertia,
Sighed…oh, for the world of nostalgia. - Camilla
There was a group of creative boys,
Who loved to play with their toys,
“The effect”, one boy said
Is completely dead
A novel idea lets employ - Jason Shulha
Creativity cannot be taught
Nor is it something that can be bought
Listen to Punya
He’ll tell this to ya,
If you don’t practice, have it, you’ll not! -Kristin Bergeron
Seeing the world differently
I what we call creativity
No more amnesia,
Inertia or fantasia
Explore, create, and share effectively - Ashley Priem
I think I must understand how
To become the one purple cow
No inertia, amnesia,
Nostalgia or fantasia
So NEW is my cool buzzword now - Jacquie Courtney
As yesterday the students engaged in searching for alphabet-shapes in the world around us, but this time with a twist. I created a problem scenario (a rather awkward one, truth be told involving Shulman, videos about amnesia, fantasia, and inertia) the solution to which were the words, Relax, Repose, Reteach. So these were the letters students searched for… and this is what they came up with.
Now for the twist! As it turns out one of the themes of today’s presentation were the three words “Explore, Create, Share.” Students watched each of the three videos that we had created (see them here) as well as the mashup that had inspired us to begin with (see the original and the mashup here).
What the students didn’t know was that the three words (Relax, Repose, Reteach) could be rearranged to read… (surprise, surprise) the words Create, Explore, Share!! Here is what that looks like…
I am in Plymouth, England, for a week, as a part of our off-campus MAET program. I spent time today with the first year cohort, talking with them about creativity in teaching (with our without technology). One of the short (5-10 minutes) activities they completed around an hour into the session was writing short poems about the creative process. Here is what they came up with:
Step by step (to be creative!)
By Miguel Herrera
Step by step… Uh baby… have some tips to be creative in this world
Step by step… uh baby…if they work, would you please let me know….
Step 1: to be NOVEL is fun!
Setp 2: if it’s not EFFECTIVE they will boo!
Step 3: Sir, would you like some tea?
Step 4: it has to be WHOLE… That’s it… I’m done….
…Would you please let me know!!!!
The New NEW
Alyssia and Katie
There once was a teacher with technology,
Who tried some creative pedagogy,
She tried something new,
And it went askew,
So she used the NEW methodology!
There was once a man from msu
From Drew, Tara, and Larissa
There was once a man from msu
Who came to us with something NEW
It wasn’t a novel effective or whole
But learning from him was quite brilliant and droll
Be creative
Cathy Emery
Be creative, quick! go! now!
You don’t need HTML know-how
How can you make a purple cow?
Weird teapots make us go wow!
Change comes quickly now..
Ciao
Knowledge
Consuelo Salazar
Jumpin’ Jesus is upon us
He started slowly
But, as we meet in the present,
His face is blurred by
The flying debris of technology
soaring between us.
They also took a moment, or two, to search for letterforms in the world around us…. here is what they spent their time discovering.
As Steve says (you can read his full post here) such remixing can provide interesting opportunities for teachers, particularly given the extremely powerful tools we have access to today. Think for a moment about this video. Constructing it requires, clearly, a knowledge of the technology. This requires some level of effort to acquire but frankly that is not particularly daunting. However this technical knowledge is not enough. To create a piece such as this one, utilizing a variety of narrative devices as well as visual styles and tropes, requires having a sophisticated understanding of visual and cinematic styles, their history and meaning. However, this is not enough either. Most importantly, and possibly hardest to develop, a the soft touch the video show. This is exhibited in the subtle irony and humor and in the fact that the video does not try too hard. This soft touch is the mark of a true artist, a person comfortable in their knowledge, comfortable enough to be willing to play with it, to push it to its limits, and yet, sensitive to not going too far.
Teaching, in my opinion, with our without technology, is similar. One can know the techniques, but that is not enough. One can know their history and how they help make things meaningful. This is valuable but not enough either. It is only when we develop this soft touch, this “feeling for the organism” of teaching that true transformational teaching can occur. This is not easy to achieve – but a goal worthy of aspiring to.
Pennsylvania State University (PSU) has launched the Aesthetic Quality
Inference Engine (ACQUINE), an online system for determining the aesthetic quality of an image. The online photo-rating system helps establish the foundation for determining how people will react emotionally to a visual image. ACQUINE delivers ratings–from zero to 100–within seconds, based on visual aspects such as color saturation, color distribution, and photo composition. PSU researchers hope to improve upon the system’s current performance level of more than 80 percent consistency between human and computer ratings. “Furthermore, aesthetics represents just one dimension of human emotion,” says PSU professor James Z. Wang. “Future systems will perhaps strive to capture other emotions that pictures arouse in people.”
Wang says that linking cameras to ACQUINE could potentially enable a photographer to instantly see how the public might perceive a photo.
Now this is the ultimate democratization of the idea of aesthetics – of course diluting the idea of the aesthetic encounter to the lowest common denominator i.e. “how the public might perceive a photo.” The assumptions behind that definition of aesthetics are mind-boggling. Let me count the ways in which this is a boneheaded idea… actually let me not, at least at this time. But the link was worth sharing nonetheless. I hope to write more about this … hopefully soon.
Just when you thought I had run through all the bad poetry I can spew (see here for my palindromic poems) here is another set of poems I had all but forgotten about. A few years ago I got hooked into writing Clerihews. For the uninitiated:
The clerihew is a bit of rhyming doggerel invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956). Traditionally, it’s a four-line verse made up of two rhyming couplets, with meter intentionally (often ridiculously) irregular. Its purpose is to offer a satiric or absurd biography of a famous person. [from Wordgames in the Atlantic Monthly by Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon].
I have written a couple of dozen clerihews that were hosted on the older version of my website – but got lost in the shuffle somewhere. Here are a couple of my favorites (of course you can read them all by going here and here).
Here’s one is about my son who, when he first started speaking, would startle us all by yelling “Ka” every time he saw a car: Read the rest of this entry »
Leigh Wolf just sent me a link to this extremely creative YouTube video. The funny thing is that I had seen this a while ago but I didn’t get it. Of course now that Leigh explained it to me, it seems so obvious. Anyway, the narration is crafted in such a way that it reads the same backwards AND forwards. Now this is cool in and of itself, but the kicker is the manner in which the meaning flips when the reading reverses! Very cool.
Here is another one with the same overall idea though less well designed (and a bit more political)
What is most ironic about my “not getting it till explained” is that many years ago I had gotten bitten by the palindromic poetry bug – and had written a bunch of poems that read the same backwards and forwards. Moreover in these poems I tried hard to create a shift in meaning when you began reading the lines in reverse order. So to not notice this self-same pattern when I saw it in the video seems particularly embarrassing. Read the rest of this entry »
I have always been interested in how we use words to capture intangibles. For instance wine connoisseurs have developed a specialized language (which sadly is quite opaque to me) to explain to each other characteristics of wine. So the words “fruity” and “dry” have specific gustatory connections.
I was reminded of this on hearing this NPR story (Andrew Bird: Words As Instruments) about singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bird. This is how he describes the goal of his latest album:
Bird says that his main focus while working on Noble Beast was to represent texture in his music.
“I think of like, when I was a kid, and I would get my Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass and throw myself down in a pile of mulch or something and go in there and pretend that I was microscopic,” Bird says. “I wanted to capture that kind of woody, mossy, decaying kind of sound.”
I stumbled upon a piece (Lotus Blossom) by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries the other day… and it was like nothing else I had ever seen. At some superficial level it looked like kinetic typography, but both simpler and more complex at the same time. For a while I didn’t know what was going on, but, slowly and surely, I got caught up in the flow of the music and the text, the resonances and dissonances. This was something quite different, and new with a creative and yet uncompromising aesthetic sensibility. Murakami (see here and here) came to mind, for some reason. Read the rest of this entry »
My friend Gaurav Bhatnagar (I had blogged about his new book, Get Smart: Math Concepts here), for some reason, known only to him, has decided to create a poetry-blog based around my ambigrams. Each posting consists of one ambigram (taken from my large collection of ambigrams on Flickr), followed by a short poem inspired by it. Suffice to say, I am quite flattered by all this attention and am highlighting his work on my website (in fact it gets its own sidebar entry on the right). One might argue whether or not these writings can truly be called poems (all I can say is that Gaurav takes full advantage of poetic license), but that is not the point. What is important is the manner in which he often, in true Hofstadterian fashion, understands what inspired me to create these designs in the first place. Thus these poems serve as another layer of interpretation of these designed objects.
As I said before, I am flattered.
Consider for instance two of his poems. The first is around an ambigram of my own name: Punya Read the rest of this entry »
I had posted earlier (see Twittering a tale) about short, short fiction that is suddenly the rage. Matt Koehler just introduced me to another example of this new emerging genre: Six Word Memoirs. Check it out.
A while ago I had blogged about a webpage that chronicles how “artists work” (see my posting here). Now I discovered a whole website devoted to it. Check out Daily Routines. They are all interesting to read and the common theme that jumps out, for the most part, is the level of discipline that artistic creativity requires. Very little of the “flash of insight” moment – but lots and lots of hard work.
Here’s Murakami in the Paris Review:
When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at 4:00 am and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for 10km or swim for 1500m (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at 9:00 pm. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind. But to hold to such repetition for so long — six months to a year — requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.
What do Donald Rumsfeld and Sarah Palin have in common? Turns out that they both deliver speeches that can, at be, without much effort, converted into poetry. Check out this and this. Some of them are quite briliant.
Nashworld pointed me towards PicLits a website that he describes as being “part visual literacy, part refrigerator poetry, part… fun.” Check out his posting or visit PicLits.
A fun and thought provoking, recursive music video by Allee Willis titled “Editing is Cool.” The video attempts to capture the process of creating this very video, from the lyrics, to the music to the special effects and so on. Denise Caruso (at Salon) quotes Allee Willis as saying, “… you can see every single stage of the song and video coming together, along with work logs and lyrics and lots more.” Read the rest of this entry »
An interesting (and growing) collection of “habits, rituals and small (and occasionally big) methods people and teams use to get their work done. And in the specific anecdotes and the way people describe their own relationship to their own work.” Read the rest of this entry »
An evocative image from today’s NYTimes about our improved understanding of the beautiful phenomena known as the northern lights. You can read the story here, but I would like to quote from the end of the article: Read the rest of this entry »
Of course all comments are moderated so I still hope to protect her from some of the nastier aspects of the world (not that I can do that forever but at least I can try). 
