MATH CLASS MADE ME NERVOUS

by Nancy Byrne Iannucci

                                                for Mr. Gigliotti

except for one, 
eleventh grade, Sequential III,
with Mr. G.
 
He looked like Steven Spielberg 
with a pocket protector and chalk in hand,
a math cult leader who converted
the most atheist of math students
into a devout follower. 
 
It all made sense in his class:
Life and its angled connectivity.
It was like having a near-death experience
for fifty minutes each day.
 
He revealed math’s sacred secrets
in ways only a child could comprehend.
He took away what I hated most:
The stifled, confined view of numbers
and showed me what it was:
 a universal balance of unity and truth. 
 
Thirty-five years later,
in a world that seems like there’s no sequence at all,
we walked and slept through 9/16/25,*
the day Pythagoras was Superman,
hauling the globe back to harmony.
 
At the very least, 
I thought of Mr. G,
and how he taught me to see.

* First, "all three of the entries in that date are perfect squares—and what I mean by that is 9 is equal to 32, 16 is equal to 42, and 25 is equal to 52," says Colin Adams, a mathematician at Williams College who was first tipped off about today's special qualities during a meeting with his former student, Jake Malarkey.

  Next, those perfect squares come from consecutive numbers—three, four, and five.

  But perhaps most special of all is that three, four, and five are an example of what's called a Pythagorean triple.

  "And what that means," explains Adams, "is that if I take the sum of the squares of the first two numbers, 32 + 42, which is 9 + 16… is equal to 25, which is 52, so 32 + 42 = 52."

  This is the Pythagorean Theorem: a2 + b2 = c2. "And that in fact is the most famous theorem in all of mathematics," says Adams.  —NPR, September 16, 2025

 

Nancy Byrne Iannucci is a librarian and poet who resides in Troy, NY, with her two cats: Nash and Emily Dickinson.  THRUSH Poetry Journal, Allegro Poetry Magazine, Eunoia, Maudlin House, San Pedro River Review, 34 Orchard, Bending Genres, and Typehouse are some places you will find her. She is the author of four chapbooks: Temptation of Wood (Nixes Mate Review, 2018), Goblin Fruit (Impspired, 2021), Primitive Prayer (Plan B Press, fall 2022), and Hummingbirds and Cigarettes (Bottlecap Press, 2024). Instagram: @nancybyrneiannucci

CRITICAL 'RITHMETIC THEORY

by Chris O’Carroll

Some schools are considering altering the way they teach math to better serve struggling K-12 students. But the debate is being sucked into the culture wars. —“Is math racist? Wrong question.” The Washington Post, December 15, 2021. See also: “Is math education racist? Debate rages over changes to how US teaches the subject.” USA Today, December 7, 2021.

The Florida Department of Education announced Friday that the state has rejected more than 50 math textbooks from next school year’s curriculum, citing references to critical race theory among reasons for the rejections. —CNN, April 17, 2022

They’ve been slipping weird racial ideas in our math!

Ron DeSantis erupts in a geyser of wrath.

When Florida’s white math books spring into action,

Black lives will be in for a touch of subtraction.

Chris O’Carroll is the author of two books of poems, The Joke’s on Me and Abracadabratude.  He is a Light magazine featured poet and a contributor to several volumes of the Potcake Chapbooks series.  His work has appeared in Extreme Sonnets, Love Affairs at the Villa Nelle, New York City Haiku, and The Great American Wise Ass Poetry Anthology, among other collections.

NEW MATH

by Tricia Knoll

We have to assume other people do his math.
Fill out the multiple lines on multiple forms
with different answers depending on to whom
he is giving his tax returns. Maybe he is even
math challenged and would never check
those figures for exaggerations. How would
he know one from the other; his life is base-ten
on bloat. We know he thinks parts per million
of CO2 in the atmosphere are not proportionate
with disturbing one fraction of a second of his time.

The military did the recent math for him,
he hadn’t asked until late in the game
about the rules: how many people could die
to balance the loss of a drone. He says
one hundred and fifty is too many.
Not proportionate. (And ludicrously
low we suspect.) So are they sitting
around right now trying to decide
what is the right proportion? A figure
that works for a world teetering
on the brink of another war disaster?
Math you can explain to a child
who can hold up two fingers
to tell his age?

He might be able to handle the old daisy oracle.
It’s pretty simple. Pluck a petal. Pluck a petal.
He loves me. He loves me not.

Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet whose work appears widely in journals and anthologies. She is spending a lot of time pulling up invasive species in a woods, thinking about math and probabilities.

ROLE MODELS

by Alan Walowitz

FBI to release all of its JFK assassination files. In this file photo, President John F. Kennedy's hand reaches toward his head within seconds of being fatally shot as first lady Jacqueline Kennedy holds his forearm as the motorcade proceeds along Elm Street past the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. | James W. "Ike" Altgens, File/AP Photo via Politico, October 30, 2017

I was in homeroom when JFK got shot
and we weren’t told much
about what’d happened—
or about much else—
this was high school, late shift,
and the afternoon wore
so damn slowly into night.
But that day I learned
from the very purposeful
and well-dressed Mr. Wulf
that life must go on
and a greater angle of a triangle
is opposite a greater side,
and though I never had the need
to read the Warren Report,
I hear those august guys
absolutely nailed Theorem #6
with their fine discussion and diagrams
of angles and distance from the Book Depository
to the limo riding by in Dealey Plaza
carrying a human god, the man we most admired,
though we later found out
he had feet of clay and was just a guy.
I also learned that
if a teacher remains in the back of the room
and tamps down weeping to a quiet, plaintive sob,
a tough old bird like Mrs. Hirsch in English
can wring a pink handkerchief dry
then drown it again with her tears
and no one will think less of her.
Though the president we’ve got now
makes me sick with his lies,
his ugliness, and everything else he hides,
there’s nothing left in the vault,
unrevealed from 1963 or ‘64
that could have taught me any better
what kind of grownup
I ought to hope I’d grow up to be.


Alan Walowitz has been published in various places on the web and off. He’s a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry, and teaches at Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY and St. John’s University in his native borough of Queens, NY. Alan’s chapbook Exactly Like Love was published by Osedax Press in 2016 and is now in its second printing.