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Does anyone know the source of this limerick?
A mathematician named Klein
Thought the Möbius band was divine.
Said he: "If you glue
The edges of two,
You'll get a weird bottle like mine.
In his July 1963 Scientific American column, Martin Gardner reprinted it and said the author was unknown. Wikipedia now says it is Leo Moser. Does anyone know the PRIMARY source linking it to Moser? I'd like to know if such a source exists. Thanks!
@divbyzero It's listed with several other mathematical verses "found in papers left by the late Leo Moser", in "Some Mathematical Verses", _Amer. Math. Monthly_ 1973, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2319396 but I suppose that is not the same thing as claiming that Moser was the original author. Some of the verses listed are obviously not by Moser (one is about Moser and another is attributed to Golomb).
The first use I can find is well before Gardner's: Tucker and Bailey, "Topology", _Scientific American_, 1950, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24967355
@divbyzero @11011110
Indeed, I think it’s a real challenge to find a proof that Moser was the original author. Even if one finds a slip of paper in his handwriting saying: I just wrote a nice limerick as follows…
He may still have read it somewhere else or heard it from a friend or a bunch of guys who wrote it together in a bar over a glass of beer.
@11011110 @SylviaFysica Thank you both! Wow! Good sleuthing! So, with all that info, it seems more likely that it was misattributed to Moser. Just because it was found in his papers (with other poems he didn't write) doesn't mean he wrote it. The earliest reference in print was when Moser was 28ish years old, so that doesn't rule him out. It was a year or two before Moser got his PhD, but he already had a bachelor's and master's and was teaching math by then (all according to his Wikipedia page). Also, doesn't show it was or wasn't him. Thanks!
@divbyzero The eldest attribution I found is from 2015, but it contains no reference, so it may simply be an error. https://plus.maths.org/content/introducing-klein-bottle (The link to Moser is defunct, but the archived page shows it linked to a biography, without any reference to this limerick: http://web.archive.org/web/20160305003038/http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Biographies/Moser_Leo.html)
I also checked the dead links on Wikipedia (http://web.archive.org/web/20210920225441/http://www.numbertheory.org/obituaries/OTHERS/moser/page_255.html & http://web.archive.org/web/20210920230222/http://www.numbertheory.org/obituaries/OTHERS/moser/page4.html), but also no reference to this.
@divbyzero Unrelated, but I've seen a different limerick attributed to Moser, namely this one about Paul Erdős:
A conjecture both deep and profound
Is whether the circle is round.
In a paper of Erdős,
Written in Kurdish,
A counterexample is found.
It appeared without attribution in "A Life of Mathematics: Paul Erdős (1913-1996)" by Béla Bollobás, published in the December 1996 issue of the MAA's FOCUS. In a 1996 or 1997 talk memorializing Erdős, Richard K. Guy mentioned Bollobás's article and attributed the limerick to Moser ( https://oakland.edu/Assets/upload/docs/Erdos-Number-Project/guy.pdf ).
@divbyzero OK, I did a little more digging and it turns out Moser was a prolific writer of limericks. This article, which appeared in the Monthly in 1972, has several... but not the particular one you mentioned!
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1042&context=mathfacpub
@ProfKinyon Thank you! Wow! Yes, that makes this all more curious. He writes limericks (even topological ones), but the one I asked about isn't in the published list. Hmmmm... On the one hand, the likelihood that he wrote it went way up. But on the other hand, so did the likelihood that someone would say, "Yeah, I bet he probably wrote it."
@ProfKinyon Oh, and I love some of these!
@ProfKinyon @divbyzero OK, what's the conjecture and what's the counterexample? My searches seemed to be getting hits for topology and taxicab geometry but that could be spurious. I can't just browse through all the theorems of Erdos looking for one that matches because, well this is Erdos we are talking about.
@soaproot It's just making fun of Erdös' penchant for publishing in obscure journals. According to one story, after someone recited the limerick to Erdös, he immediately wanted to publish a paper in Kurdish but he couldn't find a Kurdish mathematics journal.
@divbyzero
@ProfKinyon @divbyzero Ah, ah, OK. Half of me wants to write a version of the limerick which keeps the "Kurdish" part but references a real theorem of Erdős, but I suppose that's one of those ambitions that may remain unachieved.
For what it's worth I'd also check out Clifton Fadiman's books. It sounds like the sort of thing he'd collect, and he might have an attribution.
@divbyzero If that source is found, Wikipedia ought to be updated with that information.