Posts Tagged poetry
Forms and Formulae: The Numbers Are Not Enough
Posted by Angela Brett in Forms and Formulae on July 12, 2014
This is the third in a series called ‘Forms and Formulae‘ in which I write about articles in the Princeton Companion to Mathematics using poetic forms covered by articles in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. This post’s mathematics article is entitled ‘Some Fundamental Mathematical Definitions’ and the poetic form is air, which is a kind of song.
This song covers the first few sections of the article, about the development of the various number sets (Natural numbers [which I learnt as not including zero], whole numbers [including zero], integers, rational numbers, real numbers, and complex numbers) and finally a little abstract algebra. I’ve made a recording of it [direct mp3 link] using my robot choir and some instruments in GarageBand. I didn’t follow all the suggestions relating to airs, but one hallmark of an air is ‘illustrative musical devices highlighting specific words’, and I went overboard on that, illustrating each set using the background music. Airs are typically accompanied by a lute or other plucked instrument, but I used a piano instead, to highlight the word ‘Peano‘ in the first line.
[1 2 3]
You can play the Peano axioms.
Your successor will never fail.
But if you ain’t got nothing you ain’t got enough
so you start lower down the scale.
[0 1 2]
Well you’ve now got zero problems.
You can count on every fact.
You can add without an end, but exceed your subtrahend
or you’ll find you can’t subtract.
[-1 0 1]
So you add in the minus integers.
Zero gains another side.
You can add and take away, but not conquer all the way
’cause you can’t always divide.
[⅕,⅓, ¼]
Now your system is highly rational,
no division you can’t deal.
But no matter what you do, you can’t find the root of two
though you know that it must be real.
[ɸ, e, π]
So you fill all the gaps with irrationals.
You have a solid number line.
Solve absurdities at will but you’re out of square roots still
when you start with a minus sign.
[1+⅕i]
So you use your imagination.
You take the square of your mind’s i.
Your calculations never stall, but you wonder if that’s all
that this complex plane can fly.
[triangles, snares, cats]
The operations work on all numbers,
but is that all they can do?
They apply to other things; now you’ve groups and fields and rings
to apply that structure to.
∎
This took longer than my last Forms and Formulae, due to the recording. I made several improvements to my robot choir (an app I wrote one weekend to get my Mac to sing for me) including fixing a silly bug which had thrown the timing of my previous recordings off. I’ve also been taking music lessons over Skype with John Anealio, and I used a few of the things I learnt for this; if you know a bit of music theory you might notice a few music theory puns in there.
It’s not especially funny overall, but I mentioned when I called into Dementia Radio last night that I would submit it to the FuMP Sideshow, so I will. [Edit: and here it is!] Another thing that came up were these Tom Lehrer songs about mathematics, which the host was not aware of. They were some of the first Tom Lehrer songs I heard, and definitely worth a listen if you like Tom Lehrer, maths, or both. I found them in 2005 while looking to replace some pirated Tom Lehrer songs I’d accidentally deleted before listening to them (I did eventually buy all of Tom Lehrer’s albums) and in that same search I came across the MASSIVE database of maths and science songs, which led me to Jonathan Coulton and so many other musicians and friends.
One of those other musicians was Monty Harper, and the first tune I came up with was very similar to the verses of his Silly Song. I changed some parts to make it less similar, but mostly I just made it more repetitive and annoying. Dammit, Jim, I’m a poet, not a musician.
The article in the Princeton Companion to Mathematics was actually very long, and I haven’t finished reading it yet. Assuming I do get to the next article instead of writing something about the latter parts of this one, the next Forms and Formulae will be an alba (a dawn song about adulterous love!) about the goals of mathematical research. That should be fun. It will probably take a while, since it’s another song. Also, I will be busy next week at the 13th International Conference on the Short Story in English. I will be reading a story on the Thursday afternoon; probably a slightly revised version of Valet de cœur.
Forms and Formulae: Linguistics → Mathematics
Posted by Angela Brett in Forms and Formulae, Uncategorized on June 26, 2014
This is the second in a series called ‘Forms and Formulae‘ in which I write about articles in the Princeton Companion to Mathematics using poetic forms covered by articles in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. This week’s mathematics article is entitled ‘The Language and Grammar of Mathematics’ and the poetic form is acrostic, which is a superset of last week’s form, the abecedarius.
I’ve already written plenty of apronyms about mathematics that could be considered acrostics, so for this I had to do something else. The following is a double acrostic about the language of mathematics — the first letter of each line spells ‘Linguistics’ and the last letter of each line, read upwards, spells ‘Mathematics’. The line lengths are highly irregular (just as the mapping from linguistics to mathematics can be), which makes that less impressive, but I tried to keep decent enough rhythm and rhyme that it sounds good when read aloud.
Linguistics is mathematics.
‘Is’ it? Well, that ‘is’ a classic.
Now which ‘is’ is that ‘is’ that you and I
Grammatically understand… wait!
Understand, or understands? It all depends on how that ‘and’ treats data:
I understand ∧ you understand, or you+I is? Are? Am?
Some singular object that understands ambiguous copulae
That may~equivalence relations, ambivalent notations for functions, adjunctions, or ∈ life ∪ death
I ‘am’ and i ‘is’, in a nonempty set?
Cogito, ergo ∀ subjects Ɣ ∈ {sums, numbers, dynamics, …} Ɣ has Grammar s.t. Meaning(s)=Meaning(t)⇔s=t ∀ symbols s,t in Grammar sub gamma.
So, let ‘is’ be a relation where no such equation’s imposed but the intersection of the sets of accepted bijections on the subjects’ grammar sets are nonempty we get (and I don’t have the proof yet to hand, um… It’s trivial, readers with wits understand’em) that linguistics is mathematics, quod erat demonstrandum.
∎
This was a particularly interesting article for me, since I’m very interested in language and grammar in general. It goes into various symbols used in mathematics and talks about which parts of speech they are and how they compare to similar words or parts of speech in English. It turns out mathematics has no adjectives. I had several attempts at different acrostics, and when I figured out the first few lines of this one, I thought I’d move on to explaining a different section of the article every few lines. Then I was inspired to continue it at a time when I didn’t have the book handy, so it ended up focusing on just the first few parts with a nod to something mentioned in a later section. One nice thing I found in the article was:
- Nothing is better than lifelong happiness.
- But a cheese sandwich is better than nothing.
- Therefore, a cheese sandwich is better than lifelong happiness.
Soon after, we get the haiku I found earlier:
For every person
P there exists a drink D
such that P likes D.
It’s really a fun book to read. Next week’s Forms and Formulae will be an air on some fundamental mathematical definitions, which should be interesting because I’m not certain I fully understand the requirements for an air. I may have to dust off the robot choir.
In other news, I got some copies of the They might not be giants poster printed locally, and they look great, even when accidentally printed at twice the intended size. The English pronoun poster is quite readable at about 42x42cm, which is a little less than the size it’s on Zazzle at.
‘They might not be giants’ Poster
Posted by Angela Brett in Publishing on June 25, 2014
A while ago I wrote a poem called ‘They might not be giants‘, about the famous phrase, ‘If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’ A while later, that poem was published in Offshoots 12, the 2013 anthology of the Geneva Writers’ Group.
Ever since writing it, I’ve been thinking about how great it would be to see a picture of the tower of dwarves described. I’ve also been thinking about which plural of ‘dwarf’ is best, and a couple of grammatical and typographical decisions I made regarding the poem, but mostly I’ve been thinking about the picture. Well, I finally commissioned Len Peralta to draw that picture for me! It is gorgeous.
It is also the real reason I set up a Zazzle store; you can buy it as an 11×17 poster featuring the poem. I’ll have some printed locally as well, so if anyone near Vienna wants one they can buy one directly from me. Maybe you’d like one for yourself, or an aspiring scientist, or an inspiring teacher, or a Len Peralta fan, or an Angela Brett fan (do they exist? Edit: there is one) or even a They Might Be Giants fan who wants their poster collection to cover all possibilities. I think it’s suitable for anyone who has walls. If you know anyone who doesn’t have walls who would like some, see if you can help them find a home.
I’ve always been fascinated by Len’s videos of himself drawing, so I paid a little extra to get this mesmerising speedpaint video, which doubles as a great way to get an idea of what the poster looks like close-up. Note that the final poster has the title of the poem on it, and a few other small changes to the text.
I still can’t watch it without squeeing. It took him 2 hours, 36 minutes, which is about how long it would take me to draw a stick figure version indistinguishable from a Christmas tree.
This is actually not the first time I’ve commissioned Len to draw something for me; he also drew the picture of Jonathan Coulton transforming into an internet superstar at the beginning of a video I made to celebrate Jonathan’s Thing A Week by summarising each song in the form of a ‘roses are red’ poem. He drew most of the rest of the art in the video, too, but that was done already as part of his Visual Thing A Week project, which is the reason I know he exists.
That’s all from me. Go have fun, and tune in tomorrow for the next exciting installment of Forms and Formulae.
Forms and Formulae: Y Lines About X Letters of the Alphabets (an Abecedarius of Math(s))
Posted by Angela Brett in Forms and Formulae, Uncategorized on June 19, 2014
This is the first in a series called ‘Forms and Formulae‘ in which I write about articles in the Princeton Companion to Mathematics using poetic forms covered by articles in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, even though the Companion already contains plenty of poems. The first entry in the former is entitled ‘What is Mathematics About?’ and the first entry in the latter is abecedarius.
The following is an abecedarius of what mathematics is about — an ABC of mathematics, if you like. You can also try reading it along to ’88 Lines About 44 Women’ (which you might be familiar with from The Brunching Shuttlecocks’ ‘88 Lines About 42 Presidents‘ or the great Luke Ski’s ‘88 Lines About 44 Simpsons‘) though the rhyme scheme is different. It only coincidentally has a similar meter, but once I saw it I decided to go along with it.
Axioms are how you ask ‘what if’; just pick some — you decide.
Break it down and every branch of math(s) depends on these.
Calculus will help you count the branches that you can’t divide,
Differentiating the conditions at the boundaries.
Elements of Euclid was a textbook for millennia.
Functions follow formulae to map domain to range.
Gödel showed some true things can’t be proven, but still many are,
Held without theology as truths that never change.
Inconsistent axioms will prove all and its opposite,
Jeopardising hopes the formal system will be sending forward
Knowledge for deriving knowledge-prime or knowledge-composite.
Logic’s only limits are the ones that something’s tending toward.
Manifold(s) are ways to bring such limits to geometry.
Numerous are non-numeric methods that we use.
Often are two manifolds the same, up to isometry,
Proving that(,) there’s gobs of generality to lose.
Quod Erat Demonstrandum quoth inerrant understander,
Rigorously rational and rooted in the real,
Symbol-shuffling spanning such solution sets with candor,
Theorem after theorem or conjecture from ideal.
Universal sets have mathematicians quite inside themselves;
Vector spaces set a basis they can build upon.
Wolfram’s Weisstein’s MathWorld’s website rivals books on many shelves.
X rules the domain that functions are dependent on.
Y‘s home on the range is the solution set that many seek.
Zeno cuts each line in half so drawing it is undefined.
Alphabet is insufficient;
Beta hurry onto Greek.
Gamma raises complex powers.
Delta changes Zeno’s mind.
Epsilon‘s so small that
Zeta covers the prime landscape sole.
Eta‘s very many things;
Theta‘s varied just by one
Iota in the calculus where
Kappa played a founding role.
Lambda has a calculus.
Mu (micron)’s small, but not-none.
Nu math(s) is Tom Lehrer’s nightmare.
Xi‘s that universal set.
Omicron‘s a small big-O.
Pi squares circles’ radii.
Rho‘s a row (zeros-out) rank.
Sigma sum is all you get.
Tau is sometimes phi, 2pi.
Upsilon, we wonder, ‘Y?’
Phi‘s the golden ratio.
Chi-squared ballpark’s on the ball.
Psi‘s a polygammous one.
Omegahd, there is no end;
Aleph-null can yet extend;
Aleph one is still too small;
Beth one, too, still isn’t all;
Beth-two, one can yet transcend.
Gimel still can bring you some,
Daleth beats continuum.
Now you know your ABC(-Omega-Aleph-NOP)
Out you go to maybe see (oh, mathematicality!)
That math(s) is an infinity (for all things there exists a key!)
And cast it as a trinity (a singular plurality!)
When I decided to do this, I don’t think I realised how many Greek letters there were. In the time it would have taken to finish a normal abecedarius, I was only halfway there, and further motion seemed impossible. Luckily, Zeno was there to sympathise. I also didn’t realise any Hebrew letters after bet were used in mathematics. Apparently Cantor used gimel and daleth for yet bigger infinities. I hope to write a new Forms and Formulae each week, so the later forms had better not be this long. I didn’t always stick to things from the ‘What is Mathematics About’ article, or even that subject. However, I think I conformed to the abecedarius form fairly well; the abecedarius is often used for religious purposes, and I was able to work in that mathematics requires no faith (‘held without theology’) and extends beyond alpha and omega, and also that the differing ways of abbreviating the word in different countries (with or without ‘s’) makes it similar to the three-in-one Christian trinity.
Unintentional Haiku from New Scientist, on Shakespeare and Stuff
Posted by Angela Brett in Haiku Detector, NaPoWriMo on May 4, 2014
I’m still behind on New Scientist, so I’m now reading the issue which has a special feature on Shakespeare. It seemed like a good issue to look for poetry in. Here are the haiku that Haiku Detector detected in the articles about Shakespeare. The first is a strategically-syllabicised book promo:
His book The Science
of Shakespeare is published this
month (St Martin’s Press)
The next has a supporting quote from the Bard himself:
Supporting quote: “If
sack and sugar be a fault,
God help the wicked.”
but this one is my favourite:
Most of all he swings
between moods superbly high
and desperately low.
That doesn’t seem like enough stuff for a blog post. Luckily, the issue just after the special issue that I already found haiku in has a feature on ‘stuff’, so here’s the only haiku from that:
His leather backpack
is today’s bag to haul our
essentials around.
In case it’s still Star Wars Day when you read this, you might want to check out my post from last Star Wars Day featuring a video in which I read my poem about not having seen Star Wars.
Dear Internet
Posted by Angela Brett in NaPoWriMo on April 26, 2014
Dear Internet,
My prescriptions have been filled,
and I really do not want my blood pressure killed
if it means my blood’s not flowing ’cause my beating heart was stilled.
Dear Internet,
I’m a person like me;
I am not a Doctor Who, or a colour or a tree,
and regurgitated multi-choice is not psychology.
Dear Internet,
Radium was discovered by a mum,
but it isn’t the parenthood that proves it’s not dumb,
It’s this one weird trick called a Nobel Prize, and repeatable experiments on what to do with some.
Dear Internet,
As long as finite life’s a haz-
ard, doing fifty things that you say everyone has
(or must before they die) is nuts, to justify the thing that I identify as.
Dear Internet,
Your trick will not burn fat,
and the reason the doctors will hate you for that
is it’s useless at best, deadly at worst, but the dough that you make would cheer up grumpy cat.
Dear Internet,
I like Tim Berners-Lee too,
but that ‘vague, but exciting’ wasn’t ‘OMG you
MUST see this, and simply will not BELIEVE
the AMAZING pile of who-knows-what this headline links to!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1!!!!’
Dear Internet,
my penis is fine;
to be honest, I don’t even think that it’s mine.
In any case, I won’t call you if ever my vaginal mesh can’t keep it in line.
Dear User,
I swear it isn’t me;
I follow your instructions and I do it perfectly.
I serve your spam and lists and ads and awful poetry.
So think before you link to things you did not want to see.
I still haven’t written so much as a full draft of the short story I need to write, so I may as well get back on the NaPoWriMo horse momentarily. This probably won’t age well, as it’s based on ads and spam and web pages I see a lot of now, which will hopefully not last. The ‘vague, but exciting’ refers to the response to Tim Berners-Lee’s proposal that led to the worldwide web.
Why didn’t GlaDOS tell lies?
Posted by Angela Brett in NaPoWriMo on April 20, 2014
Where did your life go so wrong?
Why was that test not surveilled?
Why not preserve your cube long?
Who wants a slice of this cake?
Why should enriching tests end?
Why must you go the wrong way?
What is that useless eyed head?
Why kill a harmless AI?
Why don’t you have any friends?
How are they all still alive?
I haven’t been feeling inspired enough to sculpt many poems from scratch, but with enough constraints, all I have to do is inject word goo into the mould and make sure it gets into all the corners. So the other day I looked up the last three optional prompts on the NaPoWriMo blog, and followed them all: ten lines of lies, all questions, in terza rima. The mould was a little too narrow to get goo through in places, so I relaxed the last constraint to some pretty loose terza assonanza.
Of course, the first thing I thought of when I saw the lying prompt was GlaDOS (and the promised cake) from the game Portal. Most of these questions are based on things GlaDOS said during the original Portal game, approximately in order. If you haven’t played Portal, or at least heard the song ‘Still Alive‘ which Jonathan Coulton wrote for the end credits (which, by the way, my old Mac once covered), it might not make a lot of sense. Show it to a friend who has played and see how they react to it.
An alternate ending, which doesn’t end with the phrase ‘still alive’, is:
What is that useless eyed head?
Why would you kill harmless me?
Why don’t you have any friends?
What will you do now you’re free?
Unintentional Haiku from New Scientist, on Self, Sleep, and Death
Posted by Angela Brett in Haiku Detector, NaPoWriMo on April 19, 2014
Following on from the posts on reality, existence, and God and consciousness, life, and time, here are the unintentional haiku that Haiku Detector found in the last three sections of New Scientist’s special issue with the ‘big questions’: the self, sleep, and death. The ‘self’ section has a haiku in an image caption:
The self may be a
necessary illusion
(Image: Darren Hopes)
I suppose it could make sense if somebody named Darren hopes that the self is an image:
The self may be a
necessary illusion
(image, Darren hopes)
The others are from the main text:
But we surely still
have the same self today that
we had yesterday.
For most people, most
of the time, the sense of self
is seamless and whole.
These ones are about sleep, perchance about dreaming:
Our emotional
undercurrents seem to be
the guiding force here.
This one requires ‘2008’ to be pronouned ‘two thousand eight’, not ‘two thousand and eight’:
In 2008,
hints emerged that these might be
the deeper stages.
The fountain of youth
may have been as close as our
bedrooms all along.
So it’s puzzling that
we still don’t really know why
it is that we sleep.
And finally, one on the final sleep, death:
When the risk is slight,
mild concern may be all that
is appropriate.
That’s all from that special issue of New Scientist, though the latest issue is dedicated to Shakespeare, so I hope to find some poetry in it. If there’s anything else you’d like me to mine for haiku, let me know!
While I was writing a poem a day, there would be times when I’d just feel like writing prose, for a break. I was hoping that this prose pressure would build up and I’d write something amazing when NaPoWriMo ended. Now that I’m trying to prioritise writing a short story for a competition, poems are trying to force their way out. So I still could manage 30 poems in 30 days, but I’m not going to pressure myself to post them by each midnight, and I won’t feel bad about posting found haiku when I don’t have a poem ready.
Unintentional Haiku in Time Cube
Posted by Angela Brett in Haiku Detector, NaPoWriMo on April 16, 2014
I’m not sure if I’ll keep up the daily poems for NaPoWriMo for the rest of the month, because I remembered that the deadline for a short story contest I plan to enter is also at the end of the month, so I’ll need time to write something for that. But today’s What If reminded me of the hilariously incoherent ‘Time Cube‘ website, and I wondered if there were any unintentional haiku in it. I ran Haiku Detector on it, and I found these ones on the first page:
I have so much to
teach you, but you ignore me
you evil asses.
Humans ignore their
4 corner stages of life
metamorphosis.
All 4/24
hour days occur within
1 Earth rotation.
I have created
simultaneous 4 day
rotation of Earth.
Your God claimed to have
created a single day
rotation of Earth.
Singularity
educated humans are
not intelligent.
I like the first one best. I hadn’t read this far before, but it turns out the second page has some weird statements supporting racial segregation on it, so if you’re likely to be bothered by ridiculous-sounding racist statements by a crackpot, read no further.
Wonder/Fool
Posted by Angela Brett in NaPoWriMo on April 15, 2014
When my friend Hugo read Love/Sick, he said it was wonderful.
I’m not very good at taking compliments, so I responded that I’d write a parody of it called Wonder/Fool. He seemed enthusiastic about the idea:
so here it is.
When you first read my blog,
you thought it sounded really smart.
You said you had good taste, and it was yummy.
It gave a beating to your brain
and matched the beating of your heart.
Is it good?
Or are you just a dummy?
My poems were a gateway
to a state of simple bliss.
You said you read and re-read every line.
You couldn’t think of any work
that measured up to this.
Is it good?
Or is it cognitive decline?
When you read my forceful prose,
you cracked right up and had a fit,
abruptly laughed and cried yourself to pieces.
It had you rolling on the floor;
you may have peed yourself a bit.
Is it good?
Or do you get gelastic seizures?
When you first read this stanza,
you were quite beside yourself.
You found this weird recursion really hoopy,
said it put Hofstadter to shame,
and took his books all of your shelf.
Is it good?
Or are you strangely loopy?
To celebrate my work,
you drove a circus through my home.
You said my zeepding fluvacque was meticulous.
You gave me crowns and laurels
made of chopsticks and pink foam.
Is it good?
Or are you just ridiculous?
My œuvre gave you visions;
you heard a choir of angels sing.
You laughed so hard your aura’s glow became unclear.
Your quantum-astral psychics
said I’d be the next big thing.
Is it good?
Of course! The author’s the only sane one here.
I usually look up the nonsense phrases I invent to make sure they don’t mean anything I don’t want them to. I’m not surprised that people are already peddling quantum-astral things, though I kept that particular combination of quackery buzzwords because both look like words that would go before ‘physics’ rather than ‘psychics’.
What surprised me is that zeepding apparently means something in Dutch, which is commonly associated with snot. My Dutch dictionaries only have zeep (soap) and ding (thing) separately, but I’m going to guess that zeepding is a way of saying ‘bubble’ when referring to snot bubbles. I think I’ll keep that word in there.
In case you’re wondering, strange loops are something Douglas Hofstadter talks about in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, which I recommend, along with his later books Le Ton beau de Marot and I Am a Strange Loop.
I’m quite happy to have worked the word ‘gelastic‘ into a poem, since it’s where part of the name ‘Angelastic’ came from.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Please tell me if you do something cool with it.
Creative Output 