For the mathy types

[athelas]

I stumbled across this song yesterday, which I believe to be the epitomy of mathy goodness.

Song
Lyrics
Video

[Captain_Carrot]

Oh dear Og. I’m simply stunned. A good bit of the terms I understand are even used more or less correctly, and I’m sure ultrafilter, Mathochist, or Orbifold can give us a more detailed critique.

[athelas]

Oh wow, did I really write “epitomy”? It’s too early for this sort of thing.

[ultrafilter]

That’s hilarious.

[According_to_Pliny]

Gag. But that’s not speaking for the group.
Us mathy types are documented as divided on doggerel.

[Santo_Rugger]

Haha, a finite simple group of order two. Cheezy, but I like it.

[Derleth]

I can’t let this thread pass without quoting Stanislaw Lem in The Cyberiad:

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 a^2 cos 2 phi!

From here.

[Derleth]

Oh, and mods: That is a short quote from a much longer short story, which itself is published in a much longer collection. Thus it is a trivial part of the complete work and even quoted in full is a fair use of the text.

[Dervorin]

Can’t let this thread pass without making the obligatory link to Lobachevsky, by Tom Lehrer - a song that has deeply amused me for many years now.

[rowrrbazzle]

There is this relatively recent video of Tom Lehrer: