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.
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an image of chaos by Julien Clinton Sprott
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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? . . .
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