JoAnne+Growney

JoAnne has lots more poems at her website and blog. Here are 3 of them...

 Axes beget coordinates, dutifully expressing functions, graphs, helpful in justifications, keeping legendary mathematics new or peculiarly quite rational so that understanding’s visual with x, y, z.
 * ABC **


 * A Mathematician's Nightmare **

Suppose a general store -- items with unknown values and arbitrary prices, rounded for ease to whole-dollar amounts. Each day Madame X, keeper of the emporium, raises or lowers each price -- exceptional bargains and anti-bargains. Even-numbered prices divide by two, while odd ones climb by half themselves -- then half a dollar more to keep the numbers whole. Today I pause before a handsome beveled mirror priced at twenty-seven dollars. Shall I buy or wait for fifty-nine days until the price is lower? The price-changing scheme of this poem is derived from a version of the Collatz Conjecture, an unsolved problem that has stolen hours of sleep from many mathematicians. Start with any positive integer: if it is even, take half of it; if it is odd, increase it by half and round up to the next whole number. Collatz' Conjecture asserts that, regardless of the starting number, iteration of this decrease-by-half-increase-by-half process eventually leads to the number one. "A Mathematician's Nightmare" and others of JoAnne Growney's "mathematical' poems are available in //My Dance is Mathematics//, published in 2006 by [|Paper Kite Press].


 * My Dance Is Mathematics **

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind; Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave. I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned. From "Dirge without music" by Edna St. Vincent Millay*; read by Hermann Weyl in a Memorial Address for Amalie Emmy Noether on April 26, 1935 at Bryn Mawr College. Born in Germany (1882) and educated there, Noether fled the Nazis to the US in 1933.

They called you //der// Noether, as if mathematics was only for men. In 1964, nearly thirty years past your death, I saw you in a spotlight in a World's Fair mural, "Men of Modern Mathematics."

Colleagues praised your brilliance — but after they had called you fat and plain, rough and loud. Some mentioned kindness and good humor though none, in your lifetime, admitted it was you who led the way to axiomatic algebra. Direct and courageous, lacking self-concern, elegant of mind, a poet of logical ideas.

At a party when you were eight years old, you spoke up to solve a hard math puzzle. Fearless, you set yourself apart.

I followed you. I saw you forced to choose between mathematics and other romance. For women only, this exclusive standard.

I heard fathers say, dance with Emmy— just once, early in the evening. Old Max is my friend; his daughter likes to dance.

If a woman's dance is mathematics, she dances alone.

Mothers said, “Don't tease. That strange one’s heart is kind. She helps her mother with the house, and cannot help her curious mind.”

Teachers said, “She's smart, but stubborn, contentious and loud, a theory-builder not persuaded by our ideas.

Students said, “ She's hard to follow, bores me.” A few stood firm and build new algebras on her exacting formulations.

In spite of Emmy's talents, there were always reasons not to give her rank or permanent employment. She's a pacifist, a woman. She's a woman and a Jew. Her abstract thinking Is female and abstruse.

Today, history books proclaim that Noether is the greatest mathematician her sex has produced. They say she was good for a woman.


 * Excerpt from "Dirge without Music." Copyright (c) 1928, 1955 by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Norma Millay Ellis. Used by permission of Elizabeth Barnett, Literary Executor, The Millay Society.