domingo, setembro 14, 2008

Trurl the constructor

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 a endless Markov Chain!

Come, every frustrum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradiente of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.

In Riemman, Hilbert or in a 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 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.

For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole and Euler,
Wielding their compasses, theirs pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell/;

Cancel me not - for what then shall remain?
Abcissas, somes 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 products of our scalar 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 thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Has he but known such a²cos(phi)!

(Stanislaw Lem - The Cyberiad).