Mathematical Haiku

My mathematical haiku are part of a collection of haiku published in Journal of Humanistic Mathematics in January 2018: https://t.co/ZbG0JEBgL6

(Yes, even my haiku sometimes include sarcasm.) pic.twitter.com/ogPXYmmR9W

— Mason Porter (@masonporter) February 22, 2018

(Thanks to Paul Glendinning for the Twitter 'mention', from which I learned that my haiku made it into the article.)
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Calligraphy in an Old Edition of The Lady of Shalott

I recommend looking at this calligraphy while listening to Loreena McKennitt in the background. (And this is one of her very best songs, which is saying a lot.)

Enjoy the outstanding calligraphy and illuminations by Alberto Sangorski in this 1908 edition of Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott https://t.co/SU4FTrYOkG pic.twitter.com/Aq8ZUlXd0N

— Journal of Art in Society (@artinsociety) January 2, 2018

(Tip of the cap to Sydney Padua.)

Pop Sonnets

The blog Pop Sonnets presents Shakespearean-sonnet versions of pop songs. It's pretty amusing.

(Tip of the cap to Alan Champneys.)

Ph.D. Dissertation in Haiku Form

Here is my Ph.D. dissertation in haiku form:

Vibrating quantum billiards
have chaos.
I've moved on since then.


I know I'm late to the game, but I'm on the look-up-references part of writing chapter 2 of my book and a certain collaborator's website (hey, I'm citing you!) reminded me of this meme.

Jewish Haikus

Here is a website of Jewish haikus. They are hit or miss---some of them are very funny (at least if you're 'in' on the joke) and others are very stupid.

(Tip of the cap to Predrag Cvitanovic.)

The Community Structure Limerick

By semipopular demand (of just a few people, most of whom are in the humanities), I hereby present The Community Structure Limerick:

When detecting a network’s communities,
Try not to do it with impunity.
For it is not enough
To stop with that stuff.
Be sure to think about functionality.


It took me an hour to write this (and I really should have been working on other parts of the talk), and I note that I did not sacrifice any accuracy in my talk's conclusions to present them in limerick form. (That's why I have a slant rhyme with the first line. Had I made it singular, I would have lost some accuracy.)

For the network science folks out there, I spent a bit of time trying to find a good way to end a line with modularity, but I decided that both the poem and message worked better than it did in any of the ways I was able to incorporate it.

The Collected Poetic Works of Roger Clemens

I've purposely been avoiding blogging about the whole Roger Clemens steroid hearings in Congress because (simply) I think there are better ways for all of us to spend our lives.

However, Rob Neyer's blog included a link to this article in Slate that is so amusing that I had to break my moratorium and post the link here. Perhaps with a brief nod to Find me Guilty, this article takes word-for-word quotes by Roger Clemens and compiles them in poetic form. Fantastic!

For example, the following haiku ("Offensive Haiku") occurred in the 2/5/08 deposition:

I am offended.
I will be honest with you.
I am offended.

I approve!

Another limerick competition from Annals of Improbable Research

For the second month in a row, the Annals of Improbable Research limerick contest pertains to a paper within one of my fields. Last time, it was dynamical systems and this time it's applied dynamical systems (and, in particular, granular media). Moreover, I even know one of the paper's authors. (Last time, I had once met the person who was mentioned in the title of the article but didn't know if the author of the article per se.)

Anyway, here is the article being used for this month's contest:

"Maximum Angle of Stability of a Wet Granular Pile," Sarah Nowak,
Azadeh Samadani, and Arshad Kudrolli, Nature Physics, vol. 1,
August 15, 2005, pp. 50-2.

(Thanks to Charles Oppenheim for bringing this to our attention.)
The authors explain:

"Anyone who has built a sandcastle recognizes that the addition
of liquid to granular materials increases their stability.
However, measurements of this increased stability often conflict
with theory and with each other.... Using the frictionless model
and performing stability analysis within the pile, we reproduce
the dependence of the stability angle on system size, particle
size, and surface tension observed in our experiments."


RULES: Please make sure your rhymes actually do, and that your
poem is in classic, trips-off-the-tongue limerick form.

PRIZE: The winning poet will receive a (if we manage to send it
to the correct address) a free, possibly sandy issue of the
Annals of Improbable Research. Send entries (one entry per
entrant) to:

SANDCASTLE STABILITY LIMERICK COMPETITION
c/o [marca AT chem2.harvard.edu]



For the second month in a row, I hope I have time to sit down and compose a limerick. Last time, I unsurprisingly didn't end up having time and I suspect the same will be true this month. I'm especially eager to submit a limerick this month because it will give me a chance to make fun of self-organized criticality (which is an easy target), or as Predrag Cvitanovic calls it, "self-organized triviality."

But just in case I don't have time to write a limerick, here are some physics haikus that I wrote a few years ago for an APS contest. One of my haikus was deemed a winner -- ironically, it was the only one of the haikus that was serious rather than snarky! -- and it earned me a free physics t-shirt.

One of my haikus was, in fact, devoted to self-organized criticality:

The world's a sandpile.
Self-organized, trivial...
But it gives tenure.


As I have been known to say to any statistical physicist who will listen, "The world is not a sandpile." (Granted, I do some statistical physics research too, but there are times when I very much agree with Steve Strogatz's comment during an invited talk in which he compared them to piranhas.)

And the good news about doing this blog entry is that it turns out all my links to my creative writing on the Oxford server were dead because I had forgotten to copy the files over when I set up the web page. Thankfully, that problem is now fixed.

Friday Poetry

So, I'm not sure if I'll make this a regular feature (and it's technically early Saturday morning as I write this), but in these times of crisis and universal brouhaha, I feel it is appropriate to include the text of the poem that currently fits my mood.

The poem in question is "Fire and Ice" by Robert Frost:


Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.


'But what is the subtext?', I hear your cry. It's simple: I don't know how the poem was originally intended, but I am thinking more along the lines of how people act when they are very angry. As I think all of you know, my usual mode in such matters is ice. And I think the analogy between nasty arguments and fire versus ice is quite an apt one.

I hope to post a happier poem next Friday, but we'll see what kind of mood I'm in and also how well I can keep my game face up.

Update (8/6/07): My mood was very dark during this post, and I wrote this entry about two hours after I reacted rashly (and harshly) because I couldn't control my anger. So, in accordance to my attempts to change certain things, when I am in that kind of mode, I should stick to posting poems that reflect the mood and most definitely make sure I calm down before I respond to e-mails (or other media) in which feelings are involved. This post reflects the fact that part of me understood what was going on in my mind, and yet I still didn't possess the self-control to stop myself. This needs to change. In the future, I will vent those feelings out only in an entry like this (with a poem or whatnot) and not towards other people.