A poem by George (Dick) Zukerman for his cousin Joe Auslander, on the occasion of his 90th birthday!
A limmerickian ode to a favoured cousin
Zwischen Wissenschaft und Kunst
A mathematician called Joe
Reached 90, with much more to go
I’m willing to bet
That his old clarinet
Still spouts music equations each blow.
Pythagarus, Maxwell reflected
As vast complex numbers inspected.
Joe figured them out
With gravity’s clout
While his clarinet’s never neglected.
In his 91st year of delight
Relativity still in his sight
He’s sure to emerge
At Beethoven’s urge
On a clarinet playing all night
Now, as Cantor and Tartar explained
A new subset in space is contained.
Calculus, fractal and real-line
Prove clearly that she is a feline.
So we trust that by now, she’s well trained
The high school of music and art
Was patently only a start
Where all cousins attended
Their young lives up-ended
While ambitions veered wildly apart
With Clarinet, paint brush, bassoon
We all tried to reach for the moon
While some of us hurried
The others just worried
That real life would start far too soon.
When Auslander proved mathematic
No one dared to insist it was static
He found a safe part
Between science and art
A lifetime of mixture ecstatic.
Happy Birthday, Joe!
gz sept 2020
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