Happy Birthday, Will

In honor of Shakespeare's birthday (he's 444 this year... not 544... I mis-typed his age last year), I am posting a sonnet (Shakespearean, of course) I wrote in a fit of mathematical ecstasy.

I will go read Hamlet... or watch the movie. Please celebrate in your own customary way.



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Science of Patterns


The order of the colors, prism bent;
The fractions in a chambered snail’s shell;
Statistics buried, called coincidence;
The chemical recall of asphodel.

So water congregates to build a cloud
and droplets marry heavy, forming rain;
With Spanish moss’s chaos-patterned shroud
To respirations measured fill and drain.

Honeycombs, whose architects are bees;
The icy veins in alabaster’s skin;
The march of leaves up eucalyptus trees;
The oscillating song of violin.

An ocean wave will roll in, uninvolved
In differential equations it has solved.



30 Oct 2003