The colloquium buzzed with the gossip;
he could offer no valid excuse.
Percy P was a traitor of traitors,
for his work was of PRACTICAL USE!
Nobody dared to defend him.
Could it be that he'd plead the crime
That his work was just then needed
to effect quantization of time?
Ignored when he joined conversations;
one would think that he poisoned the air.
And he felt on his way to the office -
a new man might be in his chair.
A committee was in operation,
working twenty four hours a day,
Deleting his name from the journals,
and throwing his reprints away.
He knew where his future was leading,
no sense in prolonging the pain;
He left with a handful of papers,
and never was heard from again.
So take heed all you mathematicians
who pretend your endeavor is pure;
Tho' your luck may hold for a decade,
in the end you can never be sure.
Acquired many years ago from the Math Department at Brigham Young University. They credited it to the Princeton Tiger
