Poetry can be bleak. Grief, despair, loss, heartbreak and pain are timeless and universal themes that continue to be explored by contemporary writers, in poems that resonate with unflinching emotional intensity. To write, or to read, such poetry can be cathartic and healing.
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Four Clerihews
The four clerihews below are all inspired by famous mathematicians.
Pythagoras
alas
had no clue what to do
with the square root of two.
Fibonacci
was feeling scratchy
because rabbits in his field
continued to breed… and breed… and breed and breed… and breed and breed and breed….
John Napier
made a tiny error
calculating logarithms. Thankfully, the advent
of computing renders log tables redundant.
Wacław Sierpiński
was convinced he
could make holes in the carpet
but his wife blew a gasket.
The clerihews featuring Pythagoras and Wacław Sierpiński were originally published in:
“Mathematical Graffiti: Bridges 2023 Clerihew Collection,” Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Volume 14 Issue 2 (July 2024), pages 602-611. Available at: https://scholarship.claremont.edu/jhm/vol14/iss2/22