With Statistical Means, She Writes

Lawrence Mark Lesser

Math seeks
structure once
context boils off.
Not in statistics
where context informs method
and interpretation.

So when a statistician sits with context
to write poetry,
she can play
in everyone’s yard,
where sampling
yields found poetry,

where visualization
yields imagery.
Her couplets like matched pairs,
even those imperfectly rhymed,
a tail rhyme on a heavy tail.
She picks

poem size
for higher power
and adjusted R².
With elliptical confidence,
she settles for nothing
but the best

fitting line, jittering
phonetics, poetics, semantics, and linguistics.
Wrangling rawness, she scans and trims
for robustness
‘til datum yields
punctum.

The Science

Statistics education pioneers George Cobb and David Moore make an eloquent case in their 1997 American Mathematical Monthly paper for how mathematics -- but not statistics -- comes down to structure. This poem was sparked by ruminating on how poems by me or others have been informed by data science or statistical concepts or structures, including permutations, matched pairs, or sampling, as well as concrete poems (e.g., in the shape of a bell curve). The second stanza adapts a quote from John Tukey.

The Poet

Lawrence Lesser is an award-winning statistics education researcher who has given poetry talks/readings/workshops (e.g., for the National Museum of Mathematics), written peer-reviewed papers on STEM-infused poetry, and published 90 poems in over a dozen journals or anthologies (The Mathematical Intelligencer, Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, etc.; see https://larrylesser.com/math-stats-poetry/). He co-organized evenings of mathematical poetry at the Joint Mathematics Meetings, co-judged AMS student math poetry contests, and founded the Facebook group Mathematical Poets. He’s also a former teaching center director, textbook author, and award-winning songwriter who lives in El Paso with his even more hairless rescue dog Kelev and his soulmate Laurie.

Next poem: A Dance of Darwinian Proportions by Meg Muthupandiyan