‘Arctic Statistician’

Maciej Chudek

An ‘Aussie Bush Ballad’ by an Aussie statistician living in the Canadian arctic (best read in a heavy Australian accent).

Way up past that there tree line
is where I correlate
out on the windy tundra
my identities equate

If I need a transformation
I’ll derive it on the land
Those folks down in the cities
They wouldn’t understand

Coz I’m not on some cozy tangent
absorbing midnight sun
I make my math the hard way
And I’ll tell you how it’s done

If I wanna’ feed my family
I’d best get off my arse
Head out into the real world
Where the integers are sparse

I’ll fuel up my binomial
Till the power’s gettin’ high
Then diverge across them frozen lakes
That expand right to the sky

My walks seem almost random
Across those snowy plains
Tracking caribou migrations
Like endless Markov chains

When I fin’ly trace their matrix
Their range in my domain
I’m determinant to get them
But I gotta’ be restrained

So I’ll estimate the distance
Of the group and of the field
I’ll compute the discrete factors
That affect my hunting yield

Then I’ll sight in my equations
I’ll carefully weight my shot
And squeezing the divisor
I’ll solve the bloody lot!

I’ll pull out their inner products
Skin right round the outside
I’ll quarter them and halve them
And make them into Pi

The northern lights above me
The air biting my face
Regressing and predicting
This glorious subspace

I’ll tan the complex numbers
I’ll scoop out both their Is
I’ll dry ‘em out and smoke ‘em good
‘till the real part simplifies

I’ll track down hidden data
To burrows where they hide
I’ll set my snares around them
Primed, ready to divide

And when they start converging
All mean and imprecise
I’ll sum ‘em up along that line
And clean ‘em up real nice

‘till the year runs its sequence
and the snow melts in the sun
Time harmonically progresses
But the math work ain’t yet done

I gather up kurtosis
From boggy autumn stats
I cook up an ANOVA
Full of errors, meats, and fats

And in the summer season
I count the bugs that buzz
Their combinatoric nuisance
Won’t bother me because

I stay up way past midnight
With the sun still shinning bright
Strung out, sleepless but striving still
For statistical insight

‘till I find my polar axis
Spin my numbers round and round
Coordinate my limits
Get my feet back on the ground

I turn my thinking southward
Across the taiga plains
Infinity converges
‘till one insight remains

These Arctic folk around me
Who greet me in the street
We’re all in this together
And that means everything to me

So as the cold starts to confine me
And my thoughts all turn to goo
My fingers can’t work door nobs
And my math starts failing too

But I’m no longer decreasing
Into deep winter despair
I can function in this cold null space
Coz there’s folk up here who care

So that’s my occupation
And where I make my mark
I don’t need no damn chalkboard
In this endless winter dark

I’m no armchair academic
Who’ll sit and postulate
Not some idle theoretician
Or their complex conjugate

I’m no second-rate derivative
or even third or fourth
I’m an Arctic Statistician
A math man, of the north