In honor of Valentine’s Day, from one of the CUER mailing lists…
How do I love you?
Let me count the ways:
If you were an A.C. voltage
I’d keep you in phase
If you could transmit a moment
I would want to twist you
If you were a current through me
I could not resist you
If you were a scalar
I would give you a direction
Cross yourself with me
For a resultant of perfection
If you were a sine wave
I’d go up and down with you
If you switched to binary
I’d love you in base 2
If you were elastic
I could make you yield
If you were a magnet
I’d rotate within your field
If you were a pendulum
I’d give you oscillations
If you were a four-stroke engine
I’d fuel your rotation
If you were a mechanism
I would trace your motion
Transfer your momentum;
I’d conserve it with devotion
If you were a fan blade
You could spin inside my casing
If you were a metal truss
I’d be your extra bracing
If you were a soft iron core
I’d wrap my coils around you
Let me be your solenoid
My voltage would astound you
You’re the steam between my turbine blades,
The centre of my mass,
The wavelength of my cosine wave;
You are my Perfect Gas.
Your hair has high vorticity
Your skin has such low mu,
Your smile, such elasticity,
I would combine with you.
You are my complex conjugate
Convolve yourself with me
We shouldn’t wait — let’s integrate
And tend to unity.
followed by…
I’m sure that I will always be
A lonely number like root three
The three is all that’s good and right,
Why must my three keep out of sight
Beneath the vicious square root sign,
I wish instead I were a nine
For nine could thwart this evil trick,
with just some quick arithmetic
I know I’ll never see the sun, as 1.7321
Such is my reality, a sad irrationality
When hark! What is this I see,
Another square root of a three
As quietly co-waltzing by,
Together now we multiply
To form a number we prefer,
Rejoicing as an integer
We break free from our mortal bonds
With the wave of magic wands
Our square root signs become unglued
Your love for me has been renewed
Jed Christiansen 