Like James Baldwin - refuse labels!

     Last Sunday evening -- instead of watching Super Bowl LI -- in a crowded theater in downtown Silver Spring I watched the recently-released documentary "I Am Not Your Negro," narrated using words of writer James Baldwin (1924-1986).  Baldwin was a contrarian, he avoided or contradicted labels and categories.
     One of my favorite quotes -- that I see as intimately related to discovery in mathematics (from Hungarian-American Nobelist, Albert Szent-Gyorgyi (1893-1986)) -- applies also to Baldwin:

                     Discovery is seeing
                     what everybody else has seen, and thinking 
                     what nobody else has thought.

And here, from Jimmy's Blues & Other Poems (Beacon Press, 2014) is Baldwin's little poem "Imagination" which captures the same sort of mind-play that occurs with mathematics.   

The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance

     Audre Lorde (1934-1992)  is one of my favorite poets; links to my previous postings of her work in this blog are given below.  Here is the opening poem from one of Lorde's collections, The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance.

     Smelling the Wind       by Audre Lorde

     Rushing headlong
     into new silence
     your face
     dips on my horizon
     the name
     of a cherished dream  

Celebrate Black History, Valentine's Day

February is Black History Month and on the 14th we celebrate love with Valentine's Day.  To find in this blog a variety of mathy poems on these topics (and many others) use the SEARCH box found at the top of the right-hand column of this blog.

Excitement of Proving a Theorem

Wow!  From first sighting, I have loved this description:

       I prove a theorem and the house expands:
       the windows jerk free to hover near the ceiling,
       the ceiling floats away with a sigh.

These lines from "Geometry" by Rita Dove express -- as well as any string of twenty-four words I can think of -- the excitement experienced from proving a theorem.

Counting for Freedom -- the Amistad trials

     Josiah Willard Gibbs (Jr, 1839 – 1903) was an American scientist who made important theoretical contributions to physics, chemistry, and mathematics.  His father, Josiah Willard Gibbs, Sr (1790 - 1861) was an American linguist and theologian, who served as professor of sacred literature at Yale University.  Although the son is well-known in scientific circles, it is the father who interests us here -- he is the subject of a poem by New York poet Stephanie Strickland.
     The senior Gibbs was an active abolitionist and he played an important role in the Amistad trials of 1839–40. By visiting the African passengers in jail, he was able to learn to count to ten in their language, and he then searched until he located a sailor, James Covey, who recognized the words --the language was Mende -- and was able to serve as an interpreter for the Africans during their subsequent trial for mutiny. 

Problems of Translation

     June Jordan's poem "Problems of Translation: Problems of Language" (found at PoetryFoundation.org) uses numbers and measurements from an atlas as her starting point for describing the difficulty of understanding between those of us separated by distance or language.
     I am writing this on the day after the Super Bowl, particularly conscious of the fact that I do not know the language of football.   And that many others do not know the language of mathematics.  Let us try hard to understand those things that are beyond language. 
     Here is the first section (of eight) from Jordan's poem:

Problems of Translation:  Problems of Language     by June Jordan

Langston Hughes could do anything!

In the 1970s when I was a new professor (at Pennsylvania's Bloomsburg University), a particular colleague and I would chat occasionally about our teaching methods and compare them with the ways we'd been taught. We agreed that many of our teachers seemed to dump mathematics on us in any manner whatever -- supposing that, if we were smart enough, we would pick it up. We thought we were better teachers than our predecessors and yet I am haunted by knowing that the privileged -- whether by wealth or education or birthplace or whatever -- seldom see their advantage over those who are different. Still, some of us survive unlikely odds, being lucky enough to have an "I can do anything" attitude like that expressed by poet Langston Hughes (1902 - 1967) in "I, Too":

Painting tragedy with numbers

Although words such as "massacre" and "victim" and "buried" help us to understand the effects of disaster and injustice, sometimes the most vivid descriptions of horrific events are painted with numbers -- 6 million slain, 4-year-old girl raped, 11 days without food.   One of the strong poetic voices of the twentieth century was June Jordan (1936-2002).  Works in her collection, Kissing God Goodbye  (Anchor Books, 1997), speak out for all victims, in Baghdad or Belfast, in Lebanon or Algeria.  In the following poem from that 1997 collection, Jordan uses numbers to heighten her portrayal of tragedy in Bosnia.