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Vijay Fafat
- Published on
A giggle-worthy drama where the author, a mathematician himself, has shoe-horned the concept of “Pfister Forms” into 4 scenes of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”. There is no point in describing the drama. Those who are mathematicians will appreciate the inherent mathematics; most who don’t will still get a decent laugh at the absurdity of it, as well as some lovely lines, as below:
THE QUEEN: Forms!? Did you say quadratic forms!? Hamlet, don’t we have enough forms!? We already have tax forms, insurance forms, government forms, claim forms, request forms; even execution forms - I am not filling out anything! If you want some form in any case, then have a uniform! You can be a soldier!
[…]
HAMLET: Pfister will publish a very beautiful matrix proof, and less than 2 years later, Witt with his usual wit and magic, will utter a magic word, “Runde”, and the whole proof will collapse into a few lines. It will be a joke.
THE QUEEN: Brevity is the soul of wit!
[…]
THE QUEEN Claudius, you are a king; you have power, money, gold; everything! You must find an answer! What would be the right generalization of a quadratic field, a quaternion algebra, or a Cayley-Dickson algebra? THE KING (sadly): My dear Queen, unfortunately there is no royal road to mathematics
[…]
THE QUEEN I should have never married you. We should have never made a union. We cannot even prove a theorem together!
[…]
THE QUEEN You are naive, my lord. This cannot work. I am sure that you need a noncommutative nonassociative algebra; something horrible, something beyond our wildest imaginings. You need more matter with less art.
[…]
THE QUEEN (walking) To prove or not to prove, that is the question.
[…]
(The Queen grasps the sword and plunges it into the King - blood flows from the King’s heart)
THE KING (Tries to stay on his feet - he staggers): We shall never publish our solution! PUBLISH OR PERISH! OH! OH!