About four years ago, Michael Larsen sent me the following, attibuted to an unnamed math grad student at Princeton and allegedly inspired by an episode of "Northern Exposure":
My heart leaps up when I admire,
A number close to $\pi$.
So was it when I learned $\pi$'s source.
So is it now I teach the course.
So let it be when I retire,
Or let me die,
For if God chose to leave his mark,
He'd do it in a length of arc,
Placed in base 10.
And such a thing would truly be,
An act of natural $\pi$-ety.
Unable to resist the implied challenge, I racked my brains in riposte:
I think that I shall never see
A base as natural as base e
A base whose logs have unit slope,
Whose catenaries model rope,
Whose complex powers circle round,
And grow past polynomial bound,
Whose series is factorial,
Whose source is incorporeal
(For God made fingers ten, you see,
But only nerds can count on e.)
--
Congress shall make no law respecting the size of +------------------------+ integers that may be multiplied together, nor the | Joshua W. Burton | number of times that an integer may be multiplied | (847)677-3902 | by itself, nor the moduli by which an integer may | jburton@nwu.edu | be reduced.... +------------------------+
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