Tag: math poem

Posted in Humor

Two Plus Two Apples or Why Indians Flunk

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I found a piece of paper with this little poem inserted in my old notebook. It was written by Beverly Slapin. I realized I was born an Indian and will always be.
two apples

All right, class, let’s see who know what two plus two is. Yes, Doris?

I have a question. Two plus two what?

Two plus two anything.

I don’t understand.

OK, Doris, I’ll explain it to you. You have two apples and you get two more. How many do you have?

Where would I get two more?

From a tree.

Why would I pick two apples if I already have two?

Never mind, you have two apples and someone gives you two more.

Why would someone give me two more, if she could give them to someone who’s hungry?

Doris, it’s just an example.

An example of what?

Let’s try again—you have two apples and you find two more. Now, how many do you have?

Who lost them?

YOU HAVE TWO PLUS TWO APPLES!!!! HOW MANY DO YOU HAVE ALL TOGETHER????

Well, if I ate one, and gave away the other three, I’d have none left, but I could always get some more if I got hungry from that tree you were talking about before.

Doris, this is your last chance—you have two, uh, buffalo, and you get two more. Now how many do you have?

It depends. How many are cows and how many are bulls, and is any of the cows pregnant?

It’s hopeless! You Indians have absolutely no grasp of abstraction!

Huh?

-by Beverly Slapin

Posted in Algebra, What is mathematics

Love and Tensor Algebra

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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 frustrum longs to be a cone

And every vector dreams of matrices.

Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:

It whispers 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 thy 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 Bools 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 o four scalars is defines!

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 a2 cos 2 phi!

Love and Tensor Algebra is from the book The Cyberiadwritten by  Stanislaw Lem. Stanis?aw Lem was a Polish writer of science fiction, philosophy and satire. The Cyberiad is one of his best work.

The Cyberiad (Polish: Cyberiada) is a series of short stories. The Polish version was first published in 1965, with an English translation appearing in 1974. The main protagonists of the series are Trurl and Klapaucius, the “constructors”. The vast majority of characters are either robots, or intelligent machines. The stories focus on problems of the individual and society, as well as on the vain search for human happiness through technological means. The poem Love and Tensor Algebra found its way to this blog because of its mathematical flavor. And I love reciting it.