– Jeff Suzuki
Inspired by “Trees,” by Joyce Kilmer.
I think that I shall never see
An aleph set as nice as Z.
A principal ideal domain,
The ring of things that keeps me sane.
Maybe N has better grace
But semigroups should know their place.
To sum a charge or lepton number
Z can count the sheep to slumber.
Units are in Z so rare
Z’s not a field, but what the care?
For Z’s Euclidean, 1, 2, 3,
Unlike Q and R and C.
An Abel group, from 1 came you
Before the alephs, one and two
One to one with N it goes
Countable, as Cantor knows
For R was made by fools like me
But only God can make a Z
The last stanza is a reference to a famous quote by Kronecker: “God made the natural numbers. All the rest are the works of man.”
