If you are a little nasty
And football is your game
You could be headed for Canton
And the football Hall of Fame

If your fast ball reaches a hundred
You don’t need no cap and gown
And if you can win 300 games
You’ll end up in Cooperstown.

There is a Hall of Fame for soccer
And bowling has one, too
If you are good at anything
There will be a place for you.

But if you are good at math
It really is a shame
That someone hasn’t started
A Mathematics Hall of Fame

That night I corrected papers
Until well after the setting sun
Appalled at the number of students
Who thought that 0 over 0 equals one.

I decided to go off to bed
Before I started in to scream
Shortly after I shut my eyes
I started in to dream.

In my dream I started walking
Till I was tired and quite lame
Then I came across a big sign
That said, “Mathematics Hall of Fame”

The building was a dodecahedron
At the end of Fibonacci Drive
The address of the building
Was one one two three five.

On a table was a statue of Zeno
Clad in his cap and gown
I watched as it slid toward the edge
Paradoxically, it never fell down.

Next came a bust of Regiomontanus
Who made trigonometry come alive
I’ll bet that all his students know
That sine 30 is point 5.

The next room had a family of five
Each head had a different shape
The first was like an oval
The second round as a grape.

The third was parabolic
The fourth looked like xy = 1
The baby looked just like his dad
His face round as the sun.

The father’s beard came to his waist
I couldn’t help but stop and stare
Even the round-headed baby
Had lots of facial hair.

Why is this group here?
How do they fit the plan?
The little one was junior
From the Hairy Conic clan.

I thought that the bust of Newton
Had a bruise , ugly and red
Of course it was from the apple
That fell upon his head.

Newton and Leibnitz were bitter enemies
The founder of Calculus was each one’s claim
But neither was unanimously elected
To the Mathematics Hall of Fame

When the vote on Newton came up
The Germans all said, “Nien”.
And when the Leibnitz backers asked for votes
The Englishmen said, “Not mine!”

There were statues of the Bernoulli bunch
Each one was a winner
Can you imagine what was discussed
When they ate Thanksgiving dinner?

There have been many family acts
On this celestial planet
In music there were the Jacksons
Including Mike and Janet.

The Bernoulli’s never were on TV
And made the censors mad
There were no wardrobe malfunctions
Their busts were fully clad.

Galois was a young phenom
His mathematical mind was all awhirl
But socially he never learned
To stay away from another man’s girl

He was challenged to a duel
Next day at the rising sun
The winner gets the girl
The loser gets undone.

Galois stayed up all night to finish
A proof he’d worked on for days
So when the duel started
He was looking through a haze.

The victor rode off with the girl
As the blood from Galois’s body did leak
The girl was heard to make the remark,
“Thank God, I’m done with that geek.”

Then I came upon a young man
In front of an endless flight of stairs
I asked him how to get to the top
He said, “As if anybody cares”

“If you can make the first step
Then assume the nth step is done
You will be in the induction room
If you can make it to n + 1.

The hall showed a terrible bias
Only one woman was a winner
That was a display of Hypatia
But she was cooking dinner.

Euclid was a great geometer
His Elements were just super great
If he couldn’t find a proof for a theorem
He made it a postulate.

He thought that if he were given a point
And somewhere else a line
There could be only one line parallel
Would suit his thinking just fine.

He called it the Fifth Parallel Postulate
No one remembers the other four
Little did he dream that
He almost started a war.

Lobachevsky and Riemann disagreed with the claim
Supposing just for fun
There could be more than one line drawn
Or maybe there are none.

The display showed the three together
Over a bottle were having a rift
For each had a different opinion
On how to handle the fifth.

Archimedes in the bathtub
Was an interactive display
I punched the button I was to push
And wished I stayed away.

With a mighty shout “Eureka”
It was not a pretty sight
Archimedes in the nude
Just didn’t seem quite right.

The base of natural logarithms
After Euler is represented by e
How can a natural base be irrational?
Why can’t we just call it three?

He took the six most common math terms
And when his work was done
Had a formula to show the negative of
e to the i p equals one.

The teacher said take the integers 1 to 100
By adding each and finding the sum
When Friedrich Gauss was seven years old
He said it 50 times one hundred and one.

But Gauss, too had his enemies
They came from every nation
Each one with one thing in mind
To perform Gaussian Elimination.

My alarm clock went off at 6
How can that be a perfect number?
6 o’clock is a terrible time
To be awakened from my slumber.

I had such a good time with Newton
And the relationship between acceleration and mass
That I hit the slumber button
And missed my 9 o’clock class.