Mathematical Poetry at Bridges 2014


A reading in the afternoon
 
  Saturday, August 16
 6:30 - 8:00
Eoullim Hall

 

The  Program

                                                                                                        
The poetry program at Bridges 2014 is coordinated by University of Connecticut professor, Sarah Glaz, and hosted by NCME professor, Mike Naylor. The program starts with
a virtual reading: we show a movie in which twelve poets, including your coordinator and host, read from their mathematical poetry. The poems cover a variety of topics and
represent a wide range of poetic styles from traditional, to song, to multimedia, and from lyrical, to concrete, to visual. The virtual reading is followed by a live reading: an
Open Mic period, in which Bridges 2014 participants read their own mathematical poems.


The virtual reading on YouTube:  http://youtu.be/fcaL2PXuy7U    
Listen and enjoy!


About the Coordinator, the host, and the invited poets
                                                  
 

Sarah GlazPoetry Program Coordinator


Sarah Glaz is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Connecticut specializing in the area of commutative algebra. She also has a lifelong interest in poetry and is involved in many poetry related activities. Sarah translated Romanian poetry, wrote articles on the connections between mathematics and poetry, experimented with poetry in the mathematics classroom,  co-edited the poetry anthology, Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics (A K Peters, 2008), edited the Bridges 2013 Poetry Anthology (Tessellations Publishing, 2013)  and organized poetry readings. Sarah’s poetry appeared in: Ibis Review, ConvergenceThe American Math MonthlyThe Ghazal Page, Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Recursive Angel, Talking Writing, American Scientist,  The London Grip and others periodicals. She is an associate editor for Journal of Mathematics and the Arts. Additional information appears at: 
http://www.math.uconn.edu/~glaz/

                                                     
Mike NaylorPoetry Program Host

Mike Naylor is Professor of Mathematics Didactics working for the Norwegian Center for Mathematics Education in Trondheim, Norway. He is also artistic director of Matematikkhuset where he designs math rooms for schools and develops mathematical games and learning products. Mike is interested in presenting mathematical ideas in creative ways, including poetry, literature, art, music, software, drama and other performances. He was the mathematics columnist for Teaching K-8 magazine for seven years and is the author of over 100 publications spanning a range of mathematical genres including theoretical papers on mathematics, mathematics education, children's literature, poetry and a book of artwork titled Naked Geometry (NCME Publishing, 2008). For the past seven years Mike presented artwork and poetry at the Bridges conferences. More information on Mike's projects can be found at:
 http://mike-naylor.com

 
 

Mike Bartholomew-Biggs
Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
lives in London and is Emeritus Reader in Computational Mathematics at the University of Hertfordshire. His research and consultancy specialisms are optimization and optimal control, mostly applied in the aerospace industry. Since his mid-life diversification into poetry, his work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies and he has published six poetry collections―including Uneasy Relations (Hearing Eye, 2007) which attempts to unite the two halves of his brain. His latest collection, Fred and Blossom (Shoestring Press, 2013), is set in the world of aviation in the nineteen-thirties. Mike has also imported poetry into his mathematics textbooks. He is poetry editor of the on-line magazine London Grip and organizer, with Nancy Mattson, of the North London reading series Poetry in the Crypt. More information can be found at:  http://mikeb-b.blogspot.co.uk/

 


 


Tatiana
                      Bonch-OsmolovskayaTatiana Bonch-Osmolovskaya was born in former Soviet Union and studied philology at Moscow State Humanitarian University and mathematics at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, where she also taught a course in combinatorial poetry.  In 2011 she received a PhD degree from the University of New South Wales, Australia, in the area of contemporary Russian experimental poetry. Tatiana is author of six books of prose, poetry and translation, including, Introduction to the Literature of Formal Restrictions (Bakhrakh-M, 2009). She currently lectures on poetry and mathematics at Russian New University in Moscow.  She is a member of the Australia and New Zealand Slavists’ Association, and the Executive Board of the International Symmetry Association. Information on the literary events she organized as chair of  Antipodes Association of Russian Literature in Australia is available at:
http://antipodes.org.au/en.aboutAssociation.html


 

Marion Deutsche Cohen

Marion Deutsche Cohen holds a PhD degree in mathematics from Wesleyan university and teaches at Arcadia University, where her course, Mathematics in Literature, attracts an arithmetic progression of students.  Author of twenty-two books of poetry and prose, Marion published in her first volume of poetry, The Weirdest Is the Sphere (Seven Woods Press, 1979), a mathematical poem dating back to age seven. Her later mathematical poems were collected in the volume, Crossing the Equal Sign (Plain View Press, 2007). Marion’s most recent publication is the book, Still the End: Memoir of a Nursing Home Wife (Unlimited Publishing, 2013). She lives with her husband in Philadelphia, where in addition to poetry and mathematics, she enjoys food, thrift shop expeditions, and visits from her grown children and grandchildren. Samples of her work appear at:  http://www.marioncohen.net/

 

 



 

Emily Grosholz
Emily Grosholz
is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Proportions of the Heart: Poems that Play with Mathematics, with artwork by Robert Fathauer (Tessellations Publishing, 2014) and Feuilles: Huit Počmes: Edition Bilingue Français-Anglais, with artwork by Farhad Ostovani (William Blake and Co, 2009). She is Professor of Philosophy and a member of the Center for Fundamental Theory / Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos at the Pennsylvania State University and a member of the University of Paris Denis Diderot research group SPHERE /UMR 7219. Emily has been an advisory editor for the Hudson Review for almost thirty years, and joined the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics three years ago. She lives with her husband and children in State College, Pennsylvania. Additional information is available at: http://philosophy.la.psu.edu/directory/erg2

 

JoAnne Growney
JoAnne Growney
has loved poetry since she found A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson on a family bookshelf.  Her own poetry collections include Red Has No Reason (Plain View Press, 2010) and My Dance Is Mathematics (Paper Kite Press, 2006). While a professor at Pennsylvania’s Bloomsburg University, she integrated relevant poetry into her mathematics classrooms, and the collection begun there has developed into a blog, “Intersections -- Poetry with Mathematics” at http://poetrywithmathematics.blogspot.com. Besides this blog and several articles connecting poetry with mathematics, JoAnne has been active in collaborative projects with visual artists, poets and mathematicians, and in translation of Romanian poetry.   Located in Silver Spring, MD she offers writing workshops for mental health clients, writes poems and prose, and encourages her grandchildren to love both mathematics and poetry.

 

 

Geof Huth
Geof Huth
's poetry consists of one-word poems, poems written in unintelligible scripts, poems painted onto canvas or assembled within boxes, poems spoken or sung and audio or video recorded during the moments of their creation, poems created within nature and left to disappear back into it, and even syntactic text separated into lines. His mathematical poems are usually algebraic in construction and are more visual than syntactic. He writes frequently about poetry, visual and otherwise, in various literary venues, including his blog, dbqp: visualizing poetics,
http://dbqp.blogspot.com/. His most recent book of poetry, Aution Caution (Redfoxpress, Ireland, 2011), consists of a set of found and manipulated photo-poems. His previous book, ntst: the collected pwoermds of geof huth (If p then q, Manchester, England, 2010), is a collection of 775 one-word poems.

Larry Lesser
Lawrence (Larry) Lesser,
Professor of Mathematics at The University of Texas at El Paso, enjoys finding ways to integrate his long-standing loves of poetry and songwriting into his mathematics education outreach, teaching and research (a 2013 NSF-funded randomized experiment found significantly increased learning in students exposed to statistics songs). His math songs have won awards in national educational songwriting contests, attracted international media coverage, and yielded plenary presentations for national audiences (MAA, CAUSE, NCTM). His poems/lyrics venues include:  Journal of Mathematics and the Arts, The Mathematical Intelligencer, Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Humanistic Mathematics Network Journal, American Mathematical Monthly, MAA Focus, Math Horizons, Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School, Mathematics Teacher, Noticias de TODOS, BorderSenses Literary Magazine, Texas Mathematics Teacher, Teaching Statistics, STATS, Amstat News, and CAUSEweb. More information is at:  http://www.math.utep.edu/Faculty/lesser/

 

Alice Major
Alice Major
has published nine poetry collections and a book of essays, Intersecting Sets: A Poet Looks at Science (University of Alberta Press, 2011). Among her awards are the Pat Lowther Award for poetry and the Wilfrid Eggeston Award for non-fiction. Her interest in mathematics began at the age of twelve, when she was introduced to non-Euclidean geometry in one of Martin Gardner’s books.  Ever since, like Percy Bysshe Shelley, she turns to math and science ‘to replenish my store of metaphor.’ She has been president of the League of Canadian Poets, first poet laureate for her home city of Edmonton (in western Canada), and is the founder of the Edmonton Poetry Festival. In 2012 Alice was inducted to Edmonton’s Arts and Culture Hall of Fame. Additional information is available at:
http://www.alicemajor.com/

Eveline
                      Pye
Eveline Pye
worked as an Operational Research Analyst for Nchanga Consolidated Copper Mines, in Zambia, for ten years and was a Statistics Lecturer at Glasgow Caledonian University, in Scotland, for over twenty years. Her mathematical and statistical poetry has been published in a wide range of literary magazines, newspapers and anthologies. In September 2011, Significance Magazine, the joint publication of the Royal Statistical Society and the American Mathematical Association featured her work in education and published a selection of her poems as part of their Life in Statistics series. She is currently a poetry editor for New Voices Press and works for The Federation of Writer's (Scotland). A collection of her poems about Zambia will be published by Mariscat Press in Spring 2015. Examples of these poems can be found at: http://talkingwriting.com/eveline-pye-four-poems

 

Poet Amy Uyematsu was raised in southern California by parents who had been interned in American camps during World War II. She earned her undergraduate degree in mathematics at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Uyematsu’s poems consider the intersection of politics, mathematics, spirituality, and the natural world. She is the author of several poetry collections, including Stone Bow Prayer (2005), Nights of Fire, Nights of Rain (1997), and 30 Miles from J-Town (1992), which won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize.

Uyematsu co-edited the seminal anthology Roots: An Asian American Reader (1971), and her own work has been included in the anthologies Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California (2008, edited by Christopher Buckley and Gary Young), The Misread City: New Literary Los Angeles (2003, edited by Scott Timberg and 
). She has also collaborated with multimedia artists Joan Watanabe and Roger Shimomura.

Uyematsu taught math at Venice High School for more than 25 years before retiring. She lives in Culver City, California

Amy Uyematsu
Amy Uyematsu is a sansei (3rd generation Japanese American) from Los Angeles. She taught high school mathematics for over thirty years.  During that time she also published three volumes of poetry: 30 Miles from J-Town (Story Line Press, 1992), Nights of Fire, Nights of Rain (Story Line Press, 1998) , and Stone Bow Prayer (Copper Canyon Press, 2005).  Amy is the winner of the 1992 Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Her work has been published in many journals and anthologies and she was featured in “Poetry Outloud,” a national program to promote poetry in American high schools. Prior to teaching mathematics, Amy was active in Asian American Studies at UCLA, and in 1971 she coedited the anthology Roots: An Asian American Reader.  Additional information and a selection of poems is available at: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/amy-uyematsu



  Open Microphone Reading

                                                                                    The virtual reading was followed by a lively open microphone period. Bridges 2014 participants read their own mathematical
                                                                                                                        poems, sang songs, danced and told jokes.
A good time had been had by all.


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