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A poem in search of its author… ---------------------
An unknown mathematician published this pseudo-limerick in The American Mathematical Monthly in 1921:
There was a professor of Trinity Who found the square root of infinity ; But in counting the digits He was seized with the fidgets Dropped Science and took to Divinity.
We can venture to translate it (while keeping the aabba rhyme scheme) as follows:
*A very lucky scholar chanced to discover, The square root of the infinite real, But when he was seized with nervous trembling, While trying to compute each and every digit, He gave up mathematics for theology.*
Will a reader be able to track down the author of this humorous poem?
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Henri Allorge: geometry and figures of speech ---------------------------------------------
The three conics — the ellipse, the hyperbola and the parabola — are also terms from rhetoric.
This inspired the French poet Henri Allorge (1878–1938):
The Ellipse A necklace on a rosy throat, The path of planets through the skies, An egg, principle of all things, A pince-nez perched on scholars' noses; A spoon for household soups, A fine lake where the sky shows through, A locket for cherished relics, A grandmother's mirror, an old portrait, And so, in unreal regions, My heart gravitates, a faithful star, Around eternal splendors!
In another work (Petits Poèmes électriques et scientifiques [Small Electric and Scientific Poems], 1924), Allorge laments the ills of knowledge and progress — progress he had championed in his other collections.
How great the world was in the days of virgin forests, Of unspoiled mountains, of roadless plains, When the unknown lay siege to humankind on every side, When one wandered for days without finding an inn, When unexplored lands were far away! How small our earth is today, With all its cultivated fields, Its mountains with their split flanks, Its puny forests that no longer hold any mystery!
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When Babbage fancies himself a poet… ---------------------------------
The Engines of Our Ingenuity ("The engines of our ingenuity") is a radio program jointly produced by KUHF, the Houston, Texas radio station, the City of Houston, the State of Texas, and the University of Houston (United States).
The show's writer and host, John Lienhard, tells this story in episode 879:
"The British mathematician Charles Babbage (1791–1871), a pioneer of computing, once wrote to the poet Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892) to congratulate him on a poem he had just published. He did, however, make the following remark:
'In your otherwise very beautiful poem, you write:
Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born.?
If this were true, the world's population would remain constant. In truth, the birth rate is slightly higher than the death rate. I would therefore suggest, in your next edition, correcting these lines as follows:
Every moment dies a man, Every moment 1 1/16 is born.?
If one wanted to be exact, the real figure would be so long that it would not fit on the line, but I think 1 1/16 is a precise enough value for poetry.' "