Mathematical Poetry at Bridges 2013


    About the Coordinator and the Invited Poets:

                                                           
Sarah Glaz


Sarah Glaz is professor of mathematics at the University of Connecticut specializing in the mathematical area of commutative algebra. She also has a lifelong interest in poetry and enjoys getting involved in almost any kind of poetry related activity. 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), and organized poetry readings. Sarah’s poetry appeared or is forthcoming in: Ibis Review, Convergence, The American Math Monthly, The Ghazal Page, Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Recursive Angel, Talking Writing, American Scientist,  and others periodicals. She is an associate editor for Journal of Mathematics and the Arts. Additional information about her publications and related activities appears at: 
http://www.math.uconn.edu/~glaz/


Sample poem: Calculus


Michael 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 next collection, Fred and Blossom, which is set in the world of aviation in the nineteen-thirties, is due from Shoestring Press in 2013. Mike has also imported poetry into his mathematics textbooks. He is poetry editor of the on-line magazine London Grip and co-organizer of the North London reading series Poetry in the Crypt. More information can be found at: 
http://mikeb-b.blogspot.co.uk/


Sample poem: Numerical Analysis Quasi-Haiku Sequence

Tatiana Bonch-Osmolovskaya


Tatiana Bonch-Osmolovskaya was born in former Soviet Union and studied philology at Moscow State Humanitarian University and physics 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), and a number of articles in literary and philological journals. 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 co-chair of Antipodes Association of Russian Literature in Australia is available at:
http://antipodes.org.au/en.aboutAssociation.html


Sample poem: Squaring the Sphere

Carl Dorf


Carol Dorf
is fascinated with the boundaries between disciplines―mathematics and poetry―prose poetry and lineated poetry. For the past fifteen years she's taught mathematics, and led an occasional poetry workshop. Before that she taught poetry as California-Poet-in-the-Schools, at Berkeley City College and in other venues. Recently she's tried to bring her loves together by introducing poetry into the mathematics classroom, and teaching poetry writing to mathematics teachers. Her poetry has been published in many journals including: Antiphon, Spillway, Sin Fronteras, Qarrtsiluni, The Mom Egg, Unlikely Stories, The Prose Poem Project, and Poemeleon, and anthologized in: Not A Muse, Best of Indie New England, Boomer Girls, and elsewhere. She is poetry editor of the online literary magazine Talking Writing, and teaches mathematics at Berkeley High School. Her article on mathematical poetry appears at: 
http://talkingwriting.com/why-poets-sometimes-think-in-numbers/


Sample poem: Dear Ivar

Emily Grosholz


Emily Grosholz
is the author of five books of poetry,  most recently The Abacus of Years (David R. Godine Publisher, 2001), and Feuilles; Huit Poèmes: Edition Bilingue Français-Anglais, with Farhad Ostovani (William Blake and Co, 2009). She is professor of philosophy at the Pennsylvania State University and a member of the University of Paris Denis Diderot research group REHSEIS/SPHERE. Emily has been an advisory editor for the Hudson Review for over twenty-five years, and joined the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics two years ago.  She studied mathematics at the University of Chicago, and philosophy at Yale University, so that her research focuses on the history and philosophy of mathematics. She lives with her husband and children in State College, Pennsylvania. Additional information is available at: http://philosophy.la.psu.edu/faculty/profiles/grosholz.shtml

Sample poem: Proportions of the Heart

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 artistic director for 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/


Sample poem: For Mary, Turning Sixty

Eveline Pye


Eveline Pye
worked as an Operational Research Analyst for Nchanga Consolidated Copper Mines, for ten years and has been a Statistics Lecturer at Glasgow Caledonian University, in Scotland, for 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 a Chartered Statistician and a strong supporter of the British GetStats campaign, which aims to improve general understanding of statistics.  She endeavors to challenge the negative public image of statistics and statisticians through poetry. Additional information and a selection of poems is available at: 
http://laurahird.com/showcase/evelinepye.html


Sample poem: Love of Algebra



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