Week 8 - Activity!

Bridges Poets
Britt Kaufmann

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/poem-midlife-calculus/

I really loved her play on words. She used words that we see in math (and their equations) to describe feelings and emotions. As a math-y person who has always struggled in ELA classes, I enjoyed this!


Iggy McGovern
https://www2.math.uconn.edu/~glaz/Mathematical_Poetry_at_Bridges/Bridges_2026/IggyMcGovern_TheMathematicalBarman.pdf

This was very comical. I loved the scene that was set up, the idea that mathematicians do math just to do math sometimes - calculating the average size of bubbles in a beer, and the soft touch of humor at the end! This was overall a very fun poem.


Jim Wolper
https://www2.math.uconn.edu/~glaz/Mathematical_Poetry_at_Bridges/Bridges_2026/JimWolper_CangesAndDeltas.pdf

This poem was harder to follow and took more time to understand, yet there are still parts I don't understand. I believe that this poem has many very advanced math topics integrated into it, that perhaps those are the ideas I am struggling to comprehend, but overall, I envy the creativity that went into creating such a concrete lengthy math poem. 

Racheli Yovel
https://www2.math.uconn.edu/~glaz/Mathematical_Poetry_at_Bridges/Bridges_2026/RacheliYovel_TheOneShapedByUs.pdf

What I found unique about this poem, was I felt that I the the first little section put me in a place. I could imagine the words that Yovel wrote and I was placing myself by seeing these perpendicular planes. Then as the poem goes on and comes to an end, there is the idea of infinity, but there also seems to be a message of looking for (human?) connections. This could be a stretch, but that was what I interpreted. 

Dan May
https://www2.math.uconn.edu/~glaz/Mathematical_Poetry_at_Bridges/Bridges_2026/DanMay_DivisionByZero.pdf

WOW! What a great 5th poem to choose. I loved this. I loved the idea of just accepting it and moving on, because there are worst things in life, the confusion of dividing by 0 is less than than a understandable topic such as -1 from everything. Sometimes what we don't know, won't hurt us like the things we do know could! 

Mike Naylor's poems were all very fun! Each were so unique in their own way, and I enjoyed listening to the author himself read is own poems. I feel that when we hear a poet read their own poem, the emphasis and tone is one less thing for us as readers to worry about, and perhaps the fact that it is already done, allows us to interpret and appreciate the poem a bit more! 

Fib Poem #1

I am working on a Fibonacci Sequence / Golden Ratio lesson for my final project, so I have been drawing these golden ratio diagrams, and thought that it would be fun to use my poem as the swirl, although i wrote very linearly and not so curvy... but you get the idea! 

Fib Poem #2

March is Chronic Illness Awareness Month, so here ya go! 

Pain.

Smile. 

Don't show. 

Need to sleep, 

But, so much to do. 

Chronic illness, "you don't look sick."

I really enjoyed this type of poem, I have to say, it was not easy to get the exact number of syllables for each line.