I have been blogging for 15 years now, but I have had a website for much longer than that. I built my first website back in 1998 just as I was graduating from UIUC and entering the academic job market. I still remember the URL (www.uiuc.edu/~pmishra). I designed a...
It Takes Two: A scientific romp using AI
Dark 'n' Light is an e-zine that "explores science, nature, social justice and culture, through the arts and humanities." It is a labor of love by a small, dedicated team led by Susan Matthews, former legal and policy wonk, turned editor and podcaster. I came to know...
An Euclidean coincidence
FYI, this is a somewhat pointless blog post around a somewhat funny coincidence that popped into my life the other day. I was reading a recent article in the NYTimes with the provocative title: Microsoft Says New A.I. Shows Signs of Human Reasoning, clearly a topic of...
Tell me a story: Delightful design in an airport
“Design doesn’t need to be delightful for it to work, but that’s like saying food doesn’t need to be tasty to keep us alive” — Frank Chimero I am always looking for examples of good and bad design in the world around me. Good design is rare, functional and at the same...
ChatGPT3 writes a Mathematical Proof (in verse)
Many years ago I got interested in writing poetry about mathematics (all archived on my Math-Poetry page). Just to be clear, I am not a good poet (far from it) and I am even less of a mathematician—but it was a fun exercise to engage in. That said, a couple of my...
Things we hold on to (in a shifting world)
Title image created using Dall E 2, with input by Punya Mishra My colleague Jill Koyama shared an essay published in the Refugee Research Online journal, titled "It's all in the bag: Refugees and Materiality."...
Silly me: Narrated poems for our crazy times
Shreya and I created a video a few months back consisting of a series of narrated poems written by her (and to be fair, a few by me as well ). It was just a fun, pandemic-related project created for the Sun Devil Learning Labs (SDLL). These labs were a streaming...
Of metaphors & molecules: Bridging STEM & the arts
Update on blog post that was published May 30, 2018 - since the article is now published (2 years since it was accepted for publication). Square Root: Illustration by Punya Mishra What do President Kennedy's speeches have to do with cell biology? And what does the...
Fibonacci’s Poem
Fibonacci’s PoemDecember 10, 2019 (!)OneWordIt startsSlow but sureExpanding out numerically, adding moreMarching forward, doing the math, not asking why Knowing the ratio of words, in this line and previous, will equal Phi!A number, elegant, emergent, magical; found...
A cosmologist worries (about infinity)
A cosmologist worries (about infinity)December 2019 They cannot scare me with their empty spacesBetween stars--on stars where no human race is.I have it in me so much nearer homeTo scare myself with my own desert places.~ Robert Frost, Desert Places A cosmologist,...
Perfect Vacuum (OR who wrote this poem?)
I was cleaning out my drafts folder and came across this poem. I liked it. A lot. It has my sensibility. My sense of whimsy. But I DO NOT remember writing it. Nor do I remember finding it somewhere and copying it into an email. There is no author attributed - which...
4 AM: A poem
4 AMJuly 17, 2019 The stupid smoke detectorsBeep IncessantlyThere are two of themRunning this conversationWith each otherThrough the night Their batteries dyingOr dead Funnily enoughThey fall silent during The dayLull you into thinking It is okIt was just a glitch But...
Meta Poetry: I and II
This sentence refers to itself. This sentence declares that this blog post is about 2 poems I wrote recently. Both these poems are self-referential to some degree, namely both poems are about poetry. I have been interested in self-reference for along time—and this...
Creativity is greatly valued: A poem
Creativity is greatly valuedCreativity is greatly valued For his sharpness His ability to look beyond The surface And willingness to Give it a shotTo break Out of the box The cubicle And jump When the towers burnt Who knew Box cutters Had...
Aesthetics & STEM education: A new framework
I have always been intrigued by the nature and role of the aesthetic experience in learning. A few members of the Deep-Play research group have been exploring this issue for a while (for instance we have written on, why science teachers should care about beauty in...
Collaborative Haiku
A silent white boardScribble a first line, and waitEmergent haiku. Last Friday, goofing off between meetings, I scribbled one line, five syllables long, on one of the white-boards in our office space. Within a few minutes, lo and behold, was a lovely haiku,...
Of raindrops and dying flowers
The rainfall in June –the poems I’ve pasted to wallspeel off, but leave traces.~ Basho All photos taken with my iPhone8©punyamishra
Failed Haiku
Failed Haiku Five syllables firstSecond one has seven moreA failed Haiku! So close... almost had it. In keeping with the meta-theme, here is another one, written many years ago, and lightly edited by Danah Henriksen. Turvy-Topsy limerick This limerick-wiseHas not...
Connections: Photo Haiku from Summer 2016
For the past 17 years (with just two exceptions) my summers have been spent teaching in the MAET program. 2016 was the last time I did that, teaching in Chicago the third cohort of the MSUrbanSTEM project. The MAET program runs somewhat concurrently in three...
Momentary Lapis Lazuli of Reason: Academia for better or verse
Graduate school can be a grind. Academia can be dull and dreary. But not if poetry and parody are brought into the mix. This is a volume of academic poetry titled Momentary Lapis Lazuli of Reason: Academia for better or verse. The poems in this volume are...
Synthesis: A creative cognitive tool (2 articles)
Over the past couple of years my research team (the Deep-Play Research group) and I have been writing an on-going series of articles about rethinking technology and creativity for the 21st century. Published in the journal TechTrends, these articles have been great...
Poetry, Daisies And Cobras: A Class With Manjul Bhargava
An amazing presentation by Manjul Bhargava (Fields medal winner in Mathematics) to school children in India. See how he effortlessly combines poetry, nature, music and mathematics. Watch an excerpt on YouTube below or the complete video here....
Deep-Play: Creativity in Math & Art through Visual Wordplay
I have been creating ambigrams for years now... and I feel extremely lucky that what started as a personal interest and passion has led to some wonderful experiences and learning. These include a series of articles on the mathematics behind these visual designs and...
Jabberwocky goes to graduate school
The 5th floor of Erickson Hall is a fun place to be. Typically a bunch of graduate students hang out there, working on their readings, talking shop and in general having a good time. For some reason, last week, I promised Josh Rosenberg that I would write a poem for...
Why math ed sucks (not just in India)
My friend Hartosh Bal (author of A Certain Ambiguity, a mathematical novel) has a piece in Caravan Magazine titled "Why Fields medalists are unlikely to emerge from the Indian educational system." He mentions the fact that of the three winners of the Field's medal...
Vijay Iyer, polymathy and trans-disciplinary creativity
Vijay Iyer, (http://vijay-iyer.com/) is an Indian-American jazz pianist and composer. He is a MacArthur Genius grant winner and is currently Franklin and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts at Harvard University and is widely regarded as being one of...
Who wrote this poem?
Back when I was a graduate student I got bitten by the bug of palindromic poetry - poems that read the same when read backwards. This is consistent with my love for ambigrams and other kinds of symmetrical wordplay. I had posted them on the web a while ago...
Trans-disciplinary creativity takes root (slowly)
I wanted to bring attention to two articles that came across my desk today. The first was in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled Creativity: a Cure for the Common Curriculum on efforts at range of universities seeking "to train students in how innovative thinkers...
A published poet! Yes!
I am now, officially, a published poet! My poem on imaginary numbers (The Mathematical "i") was published in the March 2013 issue of At Right Angles, a school mathematics journal. You can read my poem on my website here: The Mathematical "i" You can...
Creativity Symposium at SITE2013
We just completed our symposium at SITE titled: Breaking Disciplinary Boundaries in 21st Century Learning: Creative Teaching with Digital Technologies. The symposium consisted of 7 presentations followed a summary by Teresa Foulger (of Arizona State University). In...