The Klein Four Group is a very talented a cappella group "of the world of higher mathematics" of the Northwestern University mathematics department, composed of Clark Alexander, Scott Bailey, Mike Johnson, Kal Nanes, and Matt Salomone. Their viral single, a mathematical love song called Finite Simple Group (of Order Two), is funny and clever in an endearingly nerdy way.
The lyrics for Finite Simple Group (of Order Two):
The path of love is never smooth But mine’s continuous for you You’re the upper bound in the chains of my heart You’re my Axiom of Choice, you know it’s true
But lately our relation’s not so well-defined And I just can’t function without you I’ll prove my proposition and I’m sure you’ll find We’re a finite simple group of order two
I’m losing my identity I’m getting tensor every day And without loss of generality I will assume that you feel the same way
Since every time I see you, you just quotient out The faithful image that I map into But when we’re one-to-one you’ll see what I’m about ‘Cause we’re a finite simple group of order two
Our equivalence was stable, A principal love bundle sitting deep inside But then you drove a wedge between our two-forms Now everything is so complexified
When we first met, we simply connected My heart was open but too dense Our system was already directed To have a finite limit, in some sense
I’m living in the kernel of a rank-one map From my domain, its image looks so blue, ‘Cause all I see are zeroes, it’s a cruel trap But we’re a finite simple group of order two
I’m not the smoothest operator in my class, But we’re a mirror pair, me and you, So let’s apply forgetful functors to the past And be a finite simple group, a finite simple group, Let’s be a finite simple group of order two (Oughter: "Why not three?")
I’ve proved my proposition now, as you can see, So let’s both be associative and free And by corollary, this shows you and I to be Purely inseparable. Q. E. D.
Simply brilliant! Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - via Fugufish
A more poetic mathematical love poem is one from Stanislaw Lem’s “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, Hibert 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 let me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love’s lemmas prove,
And on our bound partition never part.
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Weilding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of any supernal sinusoidal spell?
Cancel me not — for what then shall remain?
Abcissas, 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 of our scalars is defined!
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 they sigh,
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi!
this post? Please 
Babson
Douglas Drumond
heather
Kad
-
Your purchase helps support the blog - Thank you!
