It was a dark and stormy night
As I rode through an algebraically closed field.
In search of a dragon, that complex creature of chaos I held my courage close, my nerves steeled.
And then, there it was in the distance,
Its terrible shrieks echoing from the glen.
I sharpened my wits, I pressed on forward,
“For the love of analysis, the dragon will be defeated again!”
I demolished it with De Moivre’s theorem
And attacked its differentiability with equations of Cauchy Riemann
I ducked and parried around its poles with a flurry
Using Mobius transforms to mar this demon.
But like a logarithm, it spiralled out to infinity,
And evaded my branch cuts with cruel intent,
Its singularities blew up and struck me down.
I thought that breath would be my last and my life would end.
“O you callow fool!” the menacing fiend gloated,
“did you think that you can run?
Cower before me, mere mortal!
I am the fearsome root of negative 1!”
And then, the lightning flashed and the thunder roared.
Someone emerges from the smoke and mist.
It is none other but Joe Grotowski.
He replied to the dragon, “that may be so but I am an analyst.”
He lashed it with Laurent series, calculated its Cauchy integral.
And drew contours around it till it was holomorphic through and through
The beast, now weak and wounded, tried to flee from the fray.
Joe left nothing but dusts and complex residues.
The dragon is banished! Peace is ours.
Victory goes to Joe, the master of real and imaginary.
And I, alive to witness and tell the tales
Of mathematicians, both