Harvey Mudd College senior computer science and mathematics major Emilynne Newsom recently won the college-level 2025 American Mathematical Society math poetry contest with her sonnet, “Proof”:

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.

A proof is a mathematics argument meant to establish the truth of a concept.

“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,” Newsom wrote in a statement. “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.”