Poems that Celebrate Mathematicians

     Recently I received from John Golden (blogger at mathhombre.blogspot.com and math professor at Michigan's Grand Valley State University,  this link to a collection of poems developed by students Ellen Audia and Connor Dudas as their senior project for degrees in Mathematics from Grand Valley State University.   On page 6, we have their poem about Archimedes:

Archimedes

Everyone knows

The great Archimedes

One of the leading scientists

Of the classical antiquity

The area of a circle

Equals pi r squared

Archimedes also discovered

The volume of a sphere  

He approximated pi

Better than anyone had

And exponentiated numbers

So you didn’t have to add

His ideas were useful
They weren’t just theories
Explaining the lever
And compound pulleys

He used a method
Now called exhaustion
That gave him area
And gave us integration 

Give him a place to stand 
He’ll invent anything
He’ll move the earth 
Create simple machines

The screw, the pulley 
The catapult and heat ray
Archimedes did it
And nothing got in his way

The students' Introduction includes an enthusiastic THANK-YOU to John Golden. AND, thank you -- Ellen and Connor -- for celebrating mathematics and its people and its applications with poetry!