A LOVE POEM FOR MATHEMATICIANS Come, let us hasten to a higher plane, Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn, Their indices bedecked from one to n, Commingled in an endless Markov chain! Come, every fustrum longs to be a cone, And every vector dreams of matrices. Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze: It wispers of a more ergodic zone. In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways. Our asymptotes no longer out of phase, We shall encounter, counting, face to face. I'll grant thee random access to my heart, Thou'lt tell me all the constants of the love; And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove, And in our bound partition never part. For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel, Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler, Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers, Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell? Cancel me not - for what then shall remain? Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes, A root or two, a torus, and a node: The inverse of my verse, a null domain. Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine! The product of our scalars is defined! Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind Cuts capers like a happy haversine. I see the eigenvalue in thine eye, I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh. Bernoulli would have been content to die, Had he but known such a^2 cos (2*phi)! (Excerpt from the Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem) LIMERICKS BY MATHEMATICIANS ((12 + 144 + 20 + (3 * 4^(1/2))) / 7) + (5 * 11) = 9^2 + 0 Or as a limerick A Dozen, a Gross and a Score, plus three times the square root of four, divided by seven, plus five times eleven, equals nine squared and not a bit more. By Jon Saxton (an author of math textbooks) 'Tis a favorite project of mine A new value of pi to assign. I would fix it at 3 For it's simpler, you see, Than 3 point 1 4 1 5 9. By W.S. Baring-Gould If inside a circle a line Hits the center and goes spine to spine And the line's length is "d" the circumference will be d times 3.14159 AUTHOR UNKNOWN If (1+x) (real close to 1) Is raised to the power of 1 Over x, you will find Here's the value defined: 2.718281... AUTHOR UNKNOWN BACK to the Main Page