2017 is prime!

     For her December 31 posting in Roots of Unity (Scientific American blog) mathematician Evelyn Lamb wrote about favorite primes -- and starring in her list is our new year-number, 2017.
     My own relationship with primes also is admiring-- here is an excerpt from my poem, "Fool's Gold," (found in full here) that suggests a prime as a suitable birthday gift:

          Select and give a number.  I like large primes—
          they check my tendency to subdivide
          myself among the dreams that tease
          like iron pyrites in declining light.

     "Fool's Gold" appears in my chapbook, My Dance is Mathematics (Paper Kite Press, 2006); the collection is now out-of-print but is available online here. 
     Several poems about primes have been included in earlier postings in this blog.  For example, here is a link to a 2013 posting of "The Sieve of Erastosthenes" by Robin Chapman.  And, for further exploration, here is a link to the results of searching the six years of postings using the term "prime." 

Are we speaking of "mathematics" or "poetry"?

     This week started with the excitement of an email message from Evelyn Lamb with a link to her Scientific American blog where she created a fun-to-take online poetry-math quiz based on an idea of mine (first published in 1992):

Can you tell the difference between mathematics and poetry?

Here’s a link to a SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN quiz to help you decide?

And a couple of centuries ago there was William Wordsworth -- who also contemplated both poetry and mathematics:

               On poetry and geometric truth
               and their high privilege of lasting life,
               From all internal injury exempt,
               I mused; upon these chiefly:  and at length,
               My senses yielding to the sultry air,
               Sleep seized me, and I passed into a dream.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

The Prelude, Book 5

April Celebrates Poetry and Mathematics

On April 1 (the first day of National Poetry Month and Mathematics Awareness Month) Science writer Stephen Ornes offered a guest post at The Last Word on Nothing entitled "Can an Equation be a Poem?" and on April 2 the Ornes posting appeared again, this time in the blog Future Tense at Slate.com with the title "April Should Be Mathematical Poetry Month."
     In her comment on "Can an Equation be a Poem?" Scientific American blogger Evelyn Lamb (Roots of Unity)  mentioned her math-poetry post on March 21 entitled "What T S Eliot Told Me About the Chain Rule."  Lamb quotes lines from the final stanza "Little Gidding," the last of Eliot's Four Quartets.   Here is the entire stanza with its emphasis on the mysteries of time and perspective, the circular nature of things, the difficulty of discovering a beginning.