What I’ve Been Reading Lately
Our Scrabble group is talking about what we’ve been reading lately. Barbara’s reading Running with Scissors, Bruce is reading Wuthering Heights, Susan The Time Traveler’s Wife, and I’m curling up with Numerical Semigroups. It was the title that got me. I always liked semigroups, numerical or not, wondered why the texts never said more about them. And indeed these characters have begun to pull at me; I care about them. My friends laugh when I tell them what I’m reading, laugh again when I say that, like with novels, I skip to the last page. Well, I really want to know how to make a numerical semigroup, how to make all numerical semigroups, want to know what numerical semigroups look like and what happens to them. I don’t get to tell my friends that skipping to the end doesn’t quite work; even though I’ve found out what happens, I haven’t found out how. Also, I know whodunit but not to whom it was dun.
Art Information:
- "Thelemic Magic Square" © Kyla Clay; Creative Commons license.
Marion Deutsche Cohen's latest poetry book is Lights I Have Loved, and her latest memoir is Still the End: Memoir of a Nursing Home Wife. Her books total 27, including Crossing the Equal Sign, about the experience of math, and Truth and Beauty, about the interaction among students and teacher in the course she developed called Mathematics in Literature at Arcadia University in Glenside, Pennsylvania.
Her other interests include classical piano, singing, Scrabble, thrift shopping, four grown children, and five grands. She has a poetry chapbook forthcoming—What I'm Wearing Today—about thrift shopping.
