Philosophy
Said Plato: “These things that we feel
Are not ontologically real,
But just the excresence
Of numinous essence
Our senses can never reveal.”
via Futility Closet
Calculus
The integral z-squared dz
From one to the cube root of 3
Times the cosine
Of three pi over nine
Is the log of the cube root of e.
via Scott Franklin
Biology
Planktonic cells are all alone;
More typically in biofilms grown.
Bacterial masses
Whose abundance surpasses
The weight of all elephants known.
via Brendan Niemira
A prime number
Two quintillion, seventy-seven
Quadrillion, three hundred eleven
Trillion, one billion,
Twenty-four million,
One thousand two hundred and seven.
via Andrew
Topology
The topological part of my brain
Finds Möbius strips quite a strain.
But I make you this pledge:
I’ll glue one at its edge
And build a real projective plane.
Feel free to contribute your own limericks in the comments, but please follow these guidelines:
- Keep it geeky.
- Keep it clean.
Euclid’s proof was sublime
He showed there’s no largest prime.
If there was? Well my word!
The results are absurd!
If it was prose it would rhyme.
Environmental microbial ecology:
Planktonic cells are all alone;
More typically in biofilms grown.
Bacterial masses
Whose abundance surpasses
The weight of all elephants known.
A woman who loved a good fight
Would demand, as she argued all night,
Philosophical heft
From those on the left
And empirical proof from the right.
The background to this verse may be found here.
Biologists wash hands post loo,
As chemists beforehand will do.
Biochemists discern
The wider concern,
Washing prior as well as post too.
There once was a rhymer named Hugh,
Whose limericks stopped at line two.
There once was a poet named Dunn.
Just couldn’t help but complete the implied thought in context, could you?
Okay, this is the last clean and geeky contribution I can offer…
An electron that wouldn’t behave
Like a particle was called a “wave,”
By a physicist who
Had a problem or two
With some theories he just couldn’t save.
I didn’t make these up. I read them years ago in the bathroom of the berkeley physics building…
A friend who’s in liquor production
owns a still of astounding construction
the alcohol boils
through old magnet coils
he says that it’s proof by induction
Dear S prime i note with distress
that the length of your yardstick is less
and please wind your clock
to make it tick tock
more quickly your faithful friend S
What fun limericks! I post limericks several times a week, although most aren’t geeky.
Today I celebrated Tau Day with a limerick.
Thanks for the laughs!
I got this from the book “One Two Three Infinity..” by George Gamow.
There was a young girl named Miss. Bright.
Who could travel faster than light.
She departed one day
In an Einsteinian way
And came back the previous night.
I wrote this for a friend:
A mathematician named Nitu
tried to find all the groups of degree 2.
From much computation
He found with elation
The only example was Z_2.
These are GREAT limericks.
You have a golden eye for these verses.
Thank you for posting them!