I used to loathe coordinate geometry at school, mainly because we had to calculate, plot and draw the graphs by hand. My geometry notebooks were full of wobbly parabolas and ellipses that staggered uncertainly from point to point rather than flowing in one smooth, continuous curve.
Continue readingAuthor Archives: Marian Christie
Sungrazer
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‘Sungrazer’ first appeared in Consilience Journal in June 2021.
Citizen of nowhere
He looked at me across the counter, pen poised above the form, and asked where I was born. We had made good progress up till then. Name, age, gender, marital status, I knew all the answers. But now: where was I born? A silence floated in the ice-white hall and wobbled outwards like a slowly blown bubble. My breath was going nowhere. He asked again – Your place of birth? – and the walls dissolved into sunlight, straggled poinsettia bleeding white, mealies roasted in mopani embers, crack of msasa pods curled beneath my foot. Somewhere in a non-existent country. He was getting impatient, I could see, so I drew my coat a little tighter round my self and scrabbled to release my breath. In my mental fists I held two names, one in the past and one in the present. Which one should I give him? I opened my mouth and offered the name that was on the palm of my tongue.
This poem first appeared in The Stony Thursday Book no.16, Summer 2018, edited by Nessa O’Mahony.
Poetry and Fractals
In his 1982 book ‘The Fractal Geometry of Nature’ the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot explored ‘irregular and fragmented patterns around us’ that ‘tend to be scaling, implying that the degree of their irregularity and/or fragmentation is identical at all scales.’
He called this family of shapes fractals, from the Latin adjective fractus, meaning fragmented or irregular. Such objects, Mandelbrot noted, are present in nature as well as in a wide range of fields.
Continue readingIntersections – Poetry, Mathematics and JoAnne Growney
Emmy Noether was one of the great mathematicians of the early 20th century. Born in Bavaria in 1882, she loved dancing and initially trained to be a language teacher before opting, despite numerous obstacles, to study mathematics at university. She went on to make significant contributions in many areas of mathematics and mathematical physics, most notably in the field of abstract algebra.
Continue readingMathematical forms in poetry 5 – number sequences
Sometime around 1550 BC an Egyptian scribe named Ahmes noted down a method for obtaining the area of a circle, in what is the earliest recorded attempt to evaluate the number we know as 𝜋.
The history of 𝜋 (its symbol is the Greek letter pi) is fascinating, as are its many applications in poetry. To 16 digits, the expansion of 𝜋 is
𝜋 = 3.141592653589793.
Continue readingMidwinter
The structure of this poem is based on Pascal’s Triangle.
Entanglement
Among vetch and dandelions, hollow shells, inhabitants gorged by blackbirds whose songs tremble in summer’s heat, you emerge - wrap around my calves, bind my arms, entwine my throat, caress my neck, my ears – insidious as haar that creeps in from the sea to steal the sun. Overhead, siren insistence of oystercatchers, while beneath the hawthorn bush a magpie tilts its head. Across years and continents, we cannot decohere.
This poem was first published in Dust Poetry in May 2021.
Cantor Dust
‘Cantor Dust’ was first published in Re-Side in April 2021. The poem’s structure represents the first few iterations of the fractal Cantor ternary set.
Mathematical forms in poetry 4 – Permutations
Permutations are a feature of many poetic forms: rhyme and metrical patterns, the arrangement of lines in a villanelle or pantoum, the rotation of end-words through the stanzas of a sestina. Ruth Holzer’s ‘For Dylan Thomas on His Hundredth Birthday’ is an example of a sestina by a contemporary poet, with end-words wild, sky, end, hills, wave, love.
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