Math Poem 2

A city of ones, loosely connected, never satisfied, until one and another one united as one flesh. Soon, they felt not just as ones, but a new thing too, and they called the new thing two— 1 + 1 = 2. The Reverend George Boole found the ones proclaiming two and declared them not a new thing, for theirs was no addition. No, he said, they had committed AND, become a logical one, the same sort of one each of them had been before, 1 AND 1 = 1 or stated liturgically, 1 • 1 = 1. But the ones mocked the Reverend, for thinking ones could so unite as to become another one. So they lived as two, remembering the ones they were and still were— 2 = 1 + 1.