Can you multiply with Roman numerals?

     Canadian writer Siobhan Roberts (whom I know from BIRS workshops) has a recent New Yorker article that celebrates the 100th birthday and achievements of Claude Shannon (1916 -2001) -- often referred to as "the father of the information age." Most of the important information in that article I leave for you to read for yourself, but I call to your attention to one of Shannon's accomplishments featured therein -- Claude Shannon built a machine for doing arithmetic with Roman numerals.  This connects to poetry via a poem by Ron Padgett, below.

The Roman numeral system has largely been abandoned 

because arithmetic is less cumbersome with a place-value system.

 Here is a link to a site that exhibits procedures for Roman numeral arithmetic.

 The Roman Numerals     by Ron Padgett

       It must have been hard
       for the Romans to multiply
       —I don’t mean reproduce,
       but to do that computation.

Arnold diffusion (and poets of Romania)

     I have had the good fortune to attend two BIRS Math / Creative Writing workshops in Banff (most recently in January 2016) and one of the organizers of these workshops has been Florin Diacu, a Romanian-Canadian mathematician-poet at Canada's University of Victoria. (For a bit more about my interest in Romanian poets, you may visit this posting from 2012 ; for still more, use "Romania" as a blog-search term.)
     Recently I discovered the following poem by Florin in the January 2014 issue of the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics and that online journal's open-access policy permits me to offer it here.  I have wondered whether it is prudent of me to present a poem about Arnold diffusion, a topic about which I have scant mathematical background.  But I like it, even though my understanding is incomplete; I hope you like it too.