Kiera loves Math and Poetry!

Kiera Williams said...
I really believe that Sarah Glaz and JoAnne Growney are a magnificient duo. I love math and i write poetry as well, but i never thought of combining the two. I'm speechless, it's just unbelieveable. I've been inspired to try some for my myself. I thank the first person who began this series of poetry ,for thinking outside the box. It's sad to say, but thinking outside the box these days seem to have been thrown to the dogs.
Inspired,Kiera Williams

Mathematics and love coupled in professor's book of poetry
In a poem from “Five Poems about Zero,”
Eryk Salvaggio writes about losing love:
Zero is a numberof yearning.
In your absence,I have nothing.
But it’s mine.
“Sacrifice and Bliss,” a poem by Kaz Maslanka, is in the form of a mathematical equation. “
The equation-poem involves the mathematical notion of a limit,” Glaz explains.
“It can be ‘translated’ into words by saying that the relation between ego and love in a relationship is inversely proportional.
As egos approach zero,
love grows to infinity.”

Glaz says the book also contains a few “humorous, geeky” poems.
Katharine O’Brien writes in her poem “Valentine”:

You disintegrate my differential,
you dislocate my focus.
My pulse goes up like an exponential
whenever you cross my locus.

Glaz, who wrote a poem called “Calculus,” says her poem is about the passionate, early history of calculus.
“It’s something I tell my students when I teach them calculus – the story of Newton versus Leibniz,” she says.
Mathematics is much like art, Glaz says:
“I love to teach and I love doing research in mathematics.
I think that proving a theorem and writing a poem come from the same place.
You need to create, to discover, to look for a truth, to look for a pattern, and then enjoy it when it appears, and, of course, share it with students.”
Glaz is author and editor of several books and many articles in an area of mathematics called commutative algebra.
“Mathematics publications are for the initiated,” she says.
“They are read by the few hundred people around the world who work in the same research area.”Strange Attractors, on the other hand, is an interdisciplinary work touching on mathematics, poetry, and history.
In addition to the collection of poems, it includes bibliographical information for further exploration of the links between mathematics and poetry, and biographical information on the contributors and on the mathematicians appearing in the poems.
“It was exhilarating to work on such a project,” Glaz says.
“I hope the book brings poetry to mathematicians and some love of mathematics to poets. I hope people from many disciplines enjoy it.”