Strange Attractors is a collection of approximately 150 poems with strong links to mathematics in content, form, or imagery. The common theme is love, and the editors draw from its various manifestations-romantic love, spiritual love, humorous love, love between parents and children, mathematicians in love, love of mathematics. The poets include literary masters as well as celebrated mathematicians and scientists.

"What, after all, is mathematics but the poetry of the mind, and what is poetry but the mathematics of the heart?" So wrote the American mathematician and educator David Eugene Smith. In a similar vein, the German mathematician Karl Weierstrass declared, "A mathematician who is not at the same time something of a poet will never be a full mathematician." Most mathematicians will know what they meant. But what do professional poets think of mathematics?

In this delightful collection, the editors present the view of the same terrain-the connections between mathematics and poetry-from the other side of the equation: the poets. Now is your chance to see if the equation balances.

-Keith Devlin, mathematician, Stanford University, and author of The Math Gene, The Math Instinct, and The Language of Mathematics

A marvelous intelligence, mindful and clear-eyed, governs the inscape of these poems where "strangeness/is so usual nothing's strange" - nor does that commanding presence hesitate a moment before welcoming magicians, who "train as pole-vaulters do - tedious, lonely practice/ broken by a moment's flight." It is such flights we witness here, increasingly aware once again of a sum greater than its parts, of moments seemingly disparate that gradually become a mosaic catching the range of a whole life, richly lived and examined with meticulous candor.
William Pitt Root, poetry editor of CutThroat: A Journal
of the Arts, and author of eleven collections of poems
JoAnne Growney is a mathematician and a poet - a striking combination. Her poems belie the old saws about the two cultures. Red Has No Reason shows us how we can be precise and intuitive, heady and heartful.
Jan Heller Levi, poet, author of Skyspeak, editor of
A Muriel Rukeyser Reader
Red Has No Reason is a collection that takes the reader into a world with a kaleidoscope view - one that shifts, and dazzles and mystifies, despite best efforts to impose order. Her pairing of this red, raw stuff of life with mathematical precision creates a poetry collection to rival the mystical allure of the aurora.
Jerry Wemple, poet, author of The Civil War in Baltimore
and You Can See It from Here, co-editor of Common
Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, editor of
Watershed: the Journal of the Susquehanna