‘The Cyberiad” by Polish author Stanislaw Lem is a brilliant set of short stories. Its translation from Polish to English is an astounding achievement in itself, faithfully preserving the wonder of the original.
In the book, the ‘Constructor’ Trurl creates an ‘Electronic Bard’, a machine that can create poetry. Trurl’s envious rival, Klaupacius, then attempts to confuse the Bard by asking it to write, "a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit."
The Bard obligingly spits out (annontated version taken from http://lliiaa.com/2005/08/18/lem_love_tensor_algebra.php ) :
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 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.
In Riemann
, Hilbert
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 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
or Euler
,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal
sinusoidal
spell?
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
.
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 thy sigh.
Bernoulli
would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a2 cos 2ψ!