To Martin Gardner
"Lines that are parallel
meet at Infinity!"
Euclid repeatedly,
heatedly,
urged
Until he died.
and so reached that vicinity:
in it he
found that the damned things
diverged.
*Poem quoted from the book Imaginary Numbers
*Piet Hein
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I love this. Thanks!
He was Danish? And he wrote these in English? I am doubly impressed.
don't you know that how they map the plane into the sphere, by assuming all lines "converge" to "infinity", which is a point.
It's always nice to see another Piet Hein fan.