Harvey Mudd Senior Wins AMS Poetry Contest

The sonnet “Proof” by Harvey Mudd College senior Emilynne Newsom won the college-level category of the 2025 American Mathematical Society (AMS) Math Poetry contest, which celebrates creativity at the intersection of math and poetry.

The AMS describes poetry as a language that “can be whimsical, somber, joyful, beautiful, concise, thought-provoking and inspirational.” For its annual contest, AMS invites poems that are limericks, sonnets, haiku, acrostics and square stanzas (when the number of syllables per line equals the number of lines).

Newsom, a computer science and mathematics major, said, “There’s a quote from Samuel Taylor Coleridge that describes poetry as the best words in the best order, and I always felt like that had something in common with the way my professors talk about math—how there’s a beauty and elegance in a clear proof, when you’ve found all the right ideas and put them in the right order to get this bright line of logic leading you to a conclusion.

“In my experience, when I’ve worked on proofs, finding that bright line of logic usually takes about an hour of scratch work to get a solution that’s usually just a couple of lines long, but there’s a unique satisfaction in the moment when it all clicks, and I wanted to capture that feeling.”

Proof

by Emilynne Newsom ’25

There is a practice you will see in math.
It is a way of showing what is true.
In steady step-by-step it lays a path
from what you know to what you seek to prove.

A finding takes a lot of getting lost
in circles that we cannot comprehend,
but even patterns knotted up and crossed
can find a line that leads us to its end.

There is an order to the way of things.
Perhaps it is an order we can find.
The math is in the universe—it sings
in such a way that we can harmonize.

And when our logic comes out sound and clear
we hear it in the ring of truth—we’re here.

Watch Newsom share her poem: