Bridges 2012 Workshop Paper

"Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas." These words of Albert Einstein are often quoted and, indeed, it seems that the ebbs and flows of understanding and emotion as we struggle to create or understand the proof of a theorem are similar to those that accompany creation and understanding of a poem. Today's workshop will involve participants in exploratory activities that may lead to poems: we will engage in word-play as we mold mathematical ideas into limericks and geometric shapes; we will experiment with the effects of juxtaposition as we build poems from lists of numerical information or mathematical statements; we will develop collaborative poems to which we each contribute a single line.