Sarah Glaz

Tom Petsinis is an internationally acclaimed Australian novelist, playwright, and poet. He also holds a Ph.D. degree in mathematics and works as a mathematical adviser at Deakin University, Melbourne. Zero’s Whisper, Petsinis’ tenth poetry collection, offers a rich blend of the literary and the mathematical. The collection, comprising of over one hundred fourteen-line poems, is divided into nine sections, each of which considers a different aspect of a world steeped in mathematics and poetry. This review aims to provide a taste of the poetry and the themes included in the book. To discover all its hidden delights, one needs to read the book from cover to cover, perhaps more than once.

The poem-collage pair presented here is a work of collaboration between the mathematician and poet, Sarah Glaz, and the collage and ceramic artist, Mark Sanders. The piece is part of their larger joint poem-collage project involving the history of mathematics. Included as background is a brief discussion on the history and mathematics involved, and a reflection on several landmark locations and some of the relevant imagery appearing in the poem and the collage.

The interview and the ten poems authored by JoAnne Growney presented in this article reflect on the various influences and events in JoAnne’s journey through a life that includes both mathematics and poetry. The interview was conducted by Sarah Glaz in the summer of 2017 at the Bridges conference in Waterloo, Canada, where Sarah was present as the coordinator of the annual Bridges mathematical poetry readings, and JoAnne attended as an invited poet at that reading. This article is a result of the interview and several follow-up discussions.

My first poetry collection, Ode to Numbers, was published by Antrim House in September 2017 (http://www.antrimhousebooks.com/glaz.html). The book contains poems written over a quarter of a century and inspired by mathematics and my life as a mathematician. The poems in this folder are a small selection from the book—a series of seven poems focusing on events from the history of mathematics.

(2018). Two bridges: in memory of Reza Sarhangi. Journal of Mathematics and the Arts: Vol. 12, Honouring the Memory of Reza Sarhangi (1952-2016), pp. 195-195.

Poems and numbers, in particular positive integers, are intimately connected. Numbers contribute to the structure of a poem. Poetry's musicality depends not only on words, but also on quantifiable structural elements. This article explores several techniques for constructing poems using properties of sequences of positive integers. Borrowing from the name of the sequence, the poems generated by the techniques discussed in this paper can be divided into three groups: Fibonacci poems, irrational poems and prime-number poems. The paper provides an overview of each technique, including a brief mathematical background, its history, relevant literature, technical details on how it is used to structure poems and a sample of poems generated by it. We conclude with several related ideas for further exploration.

(2014). Guest editor's introduction. Journal of Mathematics and the Arts: Vol. 8, Poetry and Mathematics, pp. 1-4.