Daniel May — professor at Black Hills State University in South Dakota — enjoys not only teaching mathematics to future teachers but also exploration of the combinatorics of card games and the poetry of mathematical patterns and ideas. He spends his summers working with Bridge to Enter Advanced Mathematics (BEAM), a mathematics enrichment program for under-served public middle school students in New York City and Los Angeles.
Below I offer a poem by May that was part of the program at the recent BRIDGES Conference. (May’s poem also is found with lots of BRIDGES poetry and poet-information here at the website of Sarah Glaz.)
Eight Minutes by Daniel May
Eyelids closed,
warm
sunlight shining
bright
onto my thin skin.
Earth below me, lush and vibrant from
our star’s
nearly infinite rays.
But the sunshine now
only means
the sun had not yet
been extinguished eight minutes ago.
I am trapped in the gap between
event and information.
This poem is a cadae. It is structured by the mathematical constant pi in two distinct ways: it possesses five stanzas of 3, 1, 4, 1 and 5 lines (in that order), and the poem’s 14 lines consist of 3, 1, 4, 1, 5, 9, 2, 6, 5, 3, 5, 8, 9, and 7 syllables (in that order). The name cadae comes from selection of letters in the pi-digit positions of 3, 1, 4, 1 and 5 in the alphabet.
The title for this posting comes from a book title by Richard Hamming — a title of which I was reminded in a posting by Cliff Pickover @pickover on X — see screenshot below:
