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You are here: Home / Additional Features / Balderdash, Claptrap, Clerihew: Lesser Takes Another Turn for the Verse

Balderdash, Claptrap, Clerihew: Lesser Takes Another Turn for the Verse

April 1, 2024 1 Comment

In honor of April being both National Poetry Month and Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month, The University of Texas at El Paso’s Larry Lesser composed the following poems in the quirky form known as clerihew:
 
William Sealy Gosset
turned on the faucet,
sampled the beer:
law of error got clear.
 
Sir Ronald Fisher
tested a mixture
of milk and tea:
did milk precede?
 
Reverend Thomas Bayes
learned probability’s ways:
a minister, not friar,
he used what came prior.
 
William Playfair
made charts you display there:
a British spy with zeal
who stormed the Bastille.
 
Jerome Cornfield—
his fame was more sealed
by proving the answer
that smoking brings cancer.

Filed Under: Additional Features Tagged With: clerihew, Larry Lesser, Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month, MSAM, national poetry month, poem, University of Texas at El Paso

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  1. Larry Lesser says

    August 10, 2024 at 10:53 pm

    a few more statistics clerihew poems are among this collection published in July 2024:

    E.R. Lutken (curator), “Mathematical Graffiti: Bridges 2023 Clerihew Collection”. Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, 14(2), 602-611. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/jhm/vol14/iss2/22/

    Reply

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