Last week I became enamored with the Recamán sequence and over the weekend I decided to use it to create a poem. The beginning of the sequence is 0,1,3,6,2,7,13,20,12,11,22,10,23,9,24,8,25… (read more about how the sequence works). I then listed out the alphabet along the long side of a piece of paper with A=0, B=1, C=2, D=3, etc. Using the Recamán sequence as a guideline, I ended up with a new string of letters: A,B,D,G,C,H,N,U,M,V,L,W,K,X,J,Y,I,Z. The first word of my poem begins with an A, the second word with B, the third D, and so on as the new string dictated.
Recamán Poem
A Beautiful Day
Greater Chances Hovering
Numbers Under Moon
Vast Language Wonders
Keeping Xenophobes Jumping
Yowling In Zion
The exercise was just for fun, and a pretty ‘loose’ application compared to some of the other mathy applications that I do, but I thought it would be a great creative limitation to impose on a poem. As an additional restraint, I decided to make the poem follow the haiku form (5,7,5 syllable structure). See below for the original text.
