Elisabet Takehana and Lawrence Lesser

By Daniel Chacón,

Will Rose

Published June 8, 2025 at 12:00 PM MDT

In this episode of Words on a Wire, host Daniel Chacón speaks with UTEP math professor Lawrence Lesser and digital humanities scholar Elisabet Takehana about the surprising connections between poetry, mathematics, and data. What starts as a discussion about a poem on the number π unfolds into a wide-ranging conversation about creativity, meaning, and the human role in interpreting both language and numbers. Together, they explore how algorithms, literature, and mathematics all reflect a deeply human impulse to find patterns—and beauty—in the world around us.

Additional information

For more information on Lawrence Lesser you can visit: https://hb2504.utep.edu/Home/Profile?username=lesser
For more information on Elisabet Takehana you can visit: https://hb2504.utep.edu/Home/Profile?username=eotakehana

To download the podcast version visit wordsonawire.org

Originally aired on June 8, 2025

Tags

WW 16 KTEP Programming

Daniel Chacón

Daniel Chacón’s collection of stories, Unending Rooms, was the 2007 winner of the Hudson Prize. He has also been awarded the American Book Award, the Chris Isherwood Foundation Grant, and the Southwest Book Award. His first collection of stories, Chicano Chicanery was a finalist in the Patterson Fiction Prize and his novel and the shadows took him is available from Simon and Schuster. His new book is a collection of stories called Hotel Júarez: Stories, Rooms and Loops. He’s a professor of Fiction Writing, Kafka, and Latino/a literature in the Creative Writing Department at UTEP.

See stories by Daniel Chacón

Will Rose

Will Rose is a longtime technology and marketing executive based out of NYC and Texas. He is the co-founder of Words on a Wire’s publishing imprint, eRadical Books, and now spearheads marketing strategy for the Words on a Wire podcast. He also serves as Chief Technology Officer at the EdTech startup, Student Select, and as Head of Data Science at the artificial intelligence company, Harqen AI.

See stories by Will Rose