Triangles of poetry
Right angles of artistry
Identities of Phytagorea
Great works of Hipparchus from Nicaea
On sizes and distances
New star of 850, dances
Orbiting the poetic world
Marvelled models of astronomy oggled
Each work in all of poetic equations
Tangent, cosine and cosecant
Reversed in sine, cotangent and secant
Your trigonometric formulae in poetic expressions
They are bilingual,
fluent in a paradoxical
intersection of a line and a cloud.
Each language has a distinct cadence,
a unique inflection.
They can jump over the discontinuity,
the differential between
derivative and derivative,
integral and integral.
They put the rhythm in "logarithm"
and could remove the "can't" from "secant"
if words were defined
at the point of intersection.
The Mathematics Plague
By Elton Camp
It’s a fact of modern life we must face
Mathematics holds an important place
Arithmetic, basic algebra, geometry too
All are important skills for me and you
Of the people, only a tiny percent require
Advanced algebra, trig, calculus or higher
An educational development to abhor
Is to require all to take more and more
So much of it is of virtually no worth
To ninety-nine percent of folks on earth
Quadratic equations I’ve never had to solve
Nothing ever have those inequities involved
So far, I’ve gotten along in life just fine
Without using tangent, secant or cosine
Nor has it, even once, been of value to know
How fast, to overtake a car, I’d have to go
But we are making school increasingly tough
By continuing to teach our kids such stuff
It’s high time somebody cried out, “Enough!”
And childhood slavery to higher math rebuff
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