Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics

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This poetry anthology contains over 150 poems—each of which has a strong link to mathematics in content, form, or imagery. The collection is international, including translations of major poetic voices, and its time spread is at least 3000 years—from a fragment of The Song of Songs by King Solomon, circa 1000 BC, to contemporary American poetry. The common theme of the poems in this volume is love, interpreted with broad universality, from the peaks and valleys of romantic love, through the encircling love of family, nature, life and spirit, to the love that focuses on mathematics and mathematicians. The poems engage a variety of mathematical topics—from counting to commutative rings, and from the intermediate value theorem to infinity.

Advance Praise

“What, after all, is mathematics but the poetry of the mind, and what is poetry but the mathematics of the heart?” So wrote the American mathematician and educator David Eugene Smith. In a similar vein, the German mathematician Karl Weierstrass declared, “A mathematician who is not at the same time something of a poet will never be a full mathematician.” Most mathematicians will know what they meant. But what do professional poets think of mathematics? In this delightful collection, the editors present the view of the same terrain—the connections between mathematics and poetry—from the other side of the equation: the poets. Now is your chance to see if the equation balances.”

—Keith Devlin, mathematician, Stanford University, author of The Math Gene, The Math Instinct, and The Language of Mathematics

About the Editors

Sarah Glaz is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Connecticut and author of Commutative Coherent Rings (Springer, 1989; reissued in 2006) and other books and articles in Commutative Algebra. She also has a lifelong interest in poetry, served on the editorial board of Ibis Review, a Literary Magazine, and published several of her poems and translations in periodicals. http://www.math.uconn.edu/~glaz.

JoAnne Growney was a professor of mathematics at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania for a number of years—and during this time she began to write and to collect poetry with mathematical theme or structure. She now lives in Silver Spring, MD where she continues her writing and is involved in DC-area poetry activities. Her growing math-poetry collection is online at http://joannegrowney.com.