Everyone knows that dragons don't exist. But while this
simplistic formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice
for the scientific mind. The School of Higher Neantical Nillity is
in fact wholly unconcerned with what does exist. Indeed, the
banality of existence has been so amply demonstrated, there is no
need for us to discuss it any further here. The brilliant
Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered three
distinct kinds of dragon: The mythical, the chimerical, and the
purely hypothetical. They were all, one might say, nonexistent,
but each nonexisted in an entirely different way...
Not far from here, by a white sun, behind a green star, lived
the Steelypips, illustrious, industrious, and they hadn't a care:
no spats in their vats, no rules, no schools, no gloom, no evil
influence of the moon, no trouble from matter or antimatter -- for
they had a machine, a dream of a machine, with springs and gears
and perfect in every respect. And they lived with it, and on it,
and under it, and inside it, for it was all they had -- first they
saved up all their atoms, then they put them all together, and if
one didn't fit, why they chipped at it a bit, and everything was
just fine...
When the Universe was not so out of whack as it is today, and
all the stars were lined up in their proper places, you could
easily count them from left to right, or top to bottom, and the
larger and bluer ones were set apart, and the smaller yellowing
types pushed off to the corners as bodies of a lower grade...
Come, every frustum 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.
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!
Cancel me not -- for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die
Had he but known such a-squared cos 2(phi)!
I'll grant the random access to my heart,
Thoul't tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove
And in our bound partition never part.
In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our symptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.
She scissored short. Sorely shorn,
Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed,
Silently scheming,
Sightlessly seeking
Some savage, spectacular suicide.