Math is in. I know this because it's making appearances all through pop culture. There's the CBS show NUMB3RS, where an FBI agent's younger (genuis) brother assists in solving crimes by using mathematical formulae. And in fact, the credits in the beginning are accompanied by a voice saying, "We all use math everyday..." (you know, for predicting the weather, telling time, etc). And mathematical problems made Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code even more exciting.
And now, Gregory K. Pincus has provoked a frenzied outpouring of "Fibs" online. According to the Times, Fibs are "six-line poems that used a mathematical progression known as the Fibonacci sequence to dictate the number of syllables in each line." The Fibonacci sequence goes like this: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 and so on. Each subsequent number is the sum of the two previous numbers.
Fib poetry follows this pattern, using the Fibonnaci sequence to dictate the number of syllables in each line:
The allure of the form is that it is simple, yet restricted. The number of syllables in each line must equal the sum of the syllables in the two previous lines. So, start with 0 and 1, add them together to get your next number, which is also 1, 2 comes next, then add 2 and 1 to get 3, and so on. Mr. Pincus structured the Fibs to top out at line six, with eight syllables.
For instance, here's one from his blog:
Mom?
Mom?
WAKE UP!
Fibs are fab!
Open the paper:
Your son is in the New York Times!
(Cool Note: the comments on his blog are also left in the form of Fibs)
The explosion of this poetry online began when Pincus wrote a challenge on his blog a couple weeks ago, inviting people to come up with Fibs. Then:
...last Friday, a subscriber to the popular Web site slashdot.org — which runs over a tagline that reads "News for nerds. Stuff that matters" — linked to Mr. Pincus's original post, and suddenly, it seemed, Fibs were sprouting all over the Internet. Mr. Pincus, who wrote in his original post that he conceived of the Fibonacci poems in part as a writing exercise, said in an interview that he figures more than 100 other Web sites have linked to his post and more than 1,000 Fibs have been written since the beginning of April, which just happens to be both National Poetry Month and Mathematics Awareness Month.
Pincus is "tickled" that he ignited this explosion. And well he might be because the Fibonacci sequence is rare in poetry, eventhough it has appeared in some musical compositions and occurs in nature (according to Wikipedia, the arrangement of pines on a pine cone and the seeds on a raspberry follow the sequence!).
Here's to the melding (again) of art and math!
