Brian Shelburne's Alternate Home Page

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be. ... The computer resembles the magic of legend in this respect, too. If one character, one pause, of the incantation is not strictly in proper form, the magic doesn't work. Human beings are not accustomed to being perfect, and few areas of human activity demand it. Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.

- F. Brooks ("The Mythical Man Month", pages 7-8)

Mathematical Riffs is a collection of 27 mathematical essays each derived from or motivated by a poem, one of 27 poems, found in Manifold: poetry of mathematics 3:A Taos Press (c) 2021 by E R Lutken. Each essay elaborates the mathematics found in the corresponding poem. The mathematics gives the reader more insight into the poem and the poem gives the reader more insight to the mathematics.

Mathematical Riffs could be used as a companion to Manifold: poetry of mathematics, read as a book on mathematics and poetry, used as text for a college level interdisciplinary course combining mathematics and poetry (why not?), or ... use your imagination!

Clicking on the title above will allow you to download, free of cost (for now), a pdf copy of the book. If you download a copy please let me know by e-mailing me at bshelburne@wittenberg.edu. Let me know what you think! Thank you!

Finally - "If Poetry uses word play to express the deeper realities of life and if mathematics uses number play to reveal the deeper realities in the universe of number, then it is not surprising than on some deep level the two have an intimate connection and the one can serve as a source of inspiration for the other"

See the above quote from F. Brooks ("The Mythical Man Month")

Links to Talks I've Presented, Papers I've Written, Stuff I'm Interested In

1. From the U.S Constitution to IBM: Herman Hollerith, the 1890 Census, and the founding of IBM

2. Zuse’s Z3 Square Root Algorithm: How the Z3 computed a square root; revised text of talk given at the Fall meeting of Ohio Section of MAA in 1999.

3. Five Quadrable (Squarable) Lunes: a famous problem with a 2500 year history

4. How the ENIAC Took a Square Root: Revised text of a talk given at the Spring meeting of the Ohio Section of the MAA in 2002.

5. Another Method for Extracting Cube Roots: Expanded text for a talk given at the Spring meeting of the Ohio Section of the M.A.A. in 2005. Also available is a .pdf version of the transparencies I used.

6. The First Use of a Computer (the ENIAC) to Determine the Digits of pi. How I got interested in the problem and what I found out.
   As a follow up I presented a contributed talk titled Pi to 10,000 Digits at the Spring Meeting of the Ohio Section of the M.A.A. in 2013 which filled in some of the details for the ENIAC calculation.

7. An Origami Frustum: Finding the Volume of an Origami Frustum.

8. A Method (?) to Multiply and Divide using Roman Numerals

9. From News Around the Hollow: The Pi Guy March 2013 Pi Day Entry: The ENIAC and Pi

10. The ENIAC at 70: Details of the Euler-Heun Computation - on-line supplementary material giving the details of the Euler-Heun computation described in "The ENIAC at 70", Math Horizons, Volume 24, Issue 3, February 2017.

11. Balanced Ternary Notation: Revised text of talk given at the Spring meeting of the Ohio Section of the MAA in 2006

12. Exploring Asymmetrical Results in Mathematics: Asymmetries in the Real Numbers Paper for MathFest 2019 and Poster of same title.

13. One of my favorites, the proof of the Schroeder-Bernstein Theorem that states for infinite sets A and B if |A| <= |B| and |B| <= |A| then |A| = |B|.

14. Four Architectures: How I taught Comp 255: Principles of Computer Organization using different computer simulators