Images of a Complex World

     One of the treasures on my bookshelf is Images of a Complex World: The Art and Poetry of Chaos by University of Wisconsin poet Robin Chapman and physicist Julien Clinton Sprott (World Scientific, 2005).  The following image by Sprott accompanies a poem entitled "The Traveling Salesman's Problem is NP-Difficult." Beneath the art, I offer the poem's opening lines -- and the complete poem and other art-poetry samples from the collection are available at this link.   

an image of chaos by Julien Clinton Sprott

 

from:  The Traveling Salesman's Problem is NP-Difficult   by Robin Chapman 

 

     We were all for optimization of student opportunities

     for taking courses and minimization of teaching time

     and thought it would be simple enough for the volunteer

     engineer grads to write a program for extra credit

     to solve our annual scheduling problems

     matching up 30 staff and 90 students and 200 clients

     if only the faculty stopped being pig-headed

     about their favorite teaching times and allowed the process

     to begin with what each student wanted to take and when

     each client wanted to come and from that determine when

     each class could meet so that no student had a conflict

     with class or client, so who knew it was a problem NP-difficult,

     as hard to schedule as the Traveling Salesman or a herd

     of cats?      . . .

The complete poem (along with other samples) is available here.

Here is a link to additional work by Robin Chapman in this blog.