MathLIKE: Coining a New Word, Using It in Teaching, and in Interpreting Some of My Own Math-Poetry

There were a few things in my early and later life that led me to coin the word “mathlike.” First, when I was a teenager newly enamored with math (mostly algebra…), I would see, observe, and be inspired by various visual scenes and objects, such as lights, shadows, and bricks. There is, of course, plenty of math about lights and shadows, and in later years I worked on a math problem about bricks, but to me at the time they were “merely” mathLIKE. All the objects that inspired me were not necessarily mathematical objects but again they were, to me, still mathLIKE. This is possibly the same phenomenon as when a visual artist is inspired by being exposed to something—a picture, a scene, a part of a scene—that’s artLIKE.