Quickly!

I plan on writing a more substantial post later from home (I'm getting off campus early today, it's been a long last few weeks!), but I wanted to check in with the latest (G,φ)-gram, this one based on the homomorphism φ from the alphabet {A,...,Z} to the group (Z,+) of integers under addition, defined by letting φ(x)=1 if x is a vowel and -1 if x is a consonant.

This poem takes the value 0 under φ, as does its title:


A balance

O, Beauty, abound! O, Beauty, prevail!
O, Consonant, Vowel, be laid on the scale!


I'm not entirely happy with this poem, as it's a bit stilted. I admit that I wrote it largely in order to illustrate the methods of group theoretic poetics. (I'll be giving a talk on this stuff in our department's Senior Seminar next week, and I'd like to come up with a few more examples before then!) The fundamental difficulty in constructing this couplet is the prevalence of consonants in English, and I suspect writing such a balanced poem in Spanish, French, Italian, or Portuguese would be considerably easier. I believe I'll give it a try in the next few days.

Coming up in tonight's post: how are the Abstract Algebra students' committee presentations going? How are the Precalckers liking mathematical poetry, and how are they handling functions?