Poems

Math, everything you know You can hate it or love it But you can’t make it go Hide it in brackets or divide it by x Don’t make it complicated, it gets too complex
 * (grade 10 Student)**

**__Letter to Santa__** " Visit the people who struggle with math, bring them courage, illumine their path. Shower blessings on Polly Precision, please: She never leaves out parentheses. Increase my store of patience with 'em when they're tangled in a logarithm. Give me forebearance when (I quote) "A hyperbola has an asymptote." These are the faces I see each day. May I kindle a light in each, I pray! "

" To prove Pythagoras was right With new-found ease and much delight, -- Let's say hypotenuse is c, With one leg a and 'tother b. On c we draw a square with pride, Then triangles on every side. The square of (a + b), you see, Is c squared plus two times ab. Equate and cancel 2ab --- And we have reached the Q.E.D. "
 * Pythagorean theorem**

" A calc student upset as could be That his antiderivative didn't agree With the one in the book E'en aft one more look. Oh! Seems he forgot to write the "+ C". "
 * Integral answer**

" There was a mathematician named Nick, For whom integration was a kick. But an elliptic arc Finally left its mark. It was something he could not lick. "
 * Elliptical Answer**


 * __IMAGINARY__**, by Lawrence Mark Lesser

“ Imaginary numbers, multiples of i Everybody wonders, "are they used in real life?" Well, try the amplifier I'm using right now -- A.C.! You say it's absurd, this root of minus one. but the same things once were heard About the number negative one! Imaginary numbers are a bit complex, But in real mathematics, everything connects: Geometry, trig and call all see "i to i." Ah-hai! ”

__**Let Us Now Praise Prime Numbers**__, by Helen Spalding

“ Let us now praise prime numbers With our fathers who begat us: The power, the peculiar glory of prime numbers Is that nothing begat them, No ancestors, no factors, Adams among the multiplied generations.

None can foretell their coming. Among the ordinal numbers They do not reserve their seats, arrive unexpected. Along the lines of cardinals They rise like surprising pontiffs, Each absolute, inscrutable, self-elected.

In the beginning where chaos Ends and zero resolves, They crowd the foreground prodigal as forest, But middle distance thins them, Far distance to infinity Yields them rare as unreturning comets.

O prime improbable numbers, Long may formula-hunters Steam in abstraction, waste to skeleton patience: Stay non-conformist, nuisance, Phenomena irreducible To system, sequence, pattern or explanation ”