Once, alchemists dreamed of endless gold,

'Til they died from blade or age.

Their ambitions became a tale of old,

On which history turned the page.

In due course, earth and sky united

By towers of steel and glass

And stranger names we gave to hybrids

That by our hands came to pass.

What, in the end, is an alloy but

The changing of an essence?

Is the search long done, or is it yet

Hidden in our new science?

Heed now the view from vantage high,

The strangeness of the ways:

There are ideas which never do die,

But merely await better days.

Geology is the study of time and place

With each rock and stone in hand

We can determine the age of each landscape

Some rocks will be 5000 years old

Others maybe 3 billion years 

Inside each rock is a unique mineral

That provides mankind's greatest values

Geology is also like a mystery

Putting the pieces together to determine what happened

From the rise of a lava flow

To the formation of a mountain

Let's not for get the ancient life 

That once walked across this land

Their remains are hidden in the rocks

Awaiting their eventually discovery

Technicians evaluate blood spatter,

Other carnage, and lots of brain matter.

Viewing burst glass for clues of its shatter,

Fibers, hairs, other items may scatter.

Arcs and whorls are present in fingerprints,

Shoe size and type can be gleaned from footprints.

Tool marks on surfaces leave some imprints,

With skill, an abundance of helpful hints.

A popular field involves ballistics,

Probing guns’ unique characteristics.

How procedures work involves logistics,

Everything detailed with good statistics.

We shouldn’t forget toxicology,

Or icky bugs with entomology.

Quite complex from their terminology,

But helpful in proving chronology.

A critical actor—the detective,

Who constructs the case from his perspective.

Investigating should be objective,

Ensuring evidence is effective.

Protect the scene and don’t contaminate,

Organic fluids may disintegrate.

New leads produce data which to update,

And suspects for courts to adjudicate.

The science of a smile,

A subject that lasts a while,

It's there when we laugh,

Helping you live longer,

That's a proven fact.

A smile is biology at best,

The hidden happiness of a mouth at rest,

It's all because of those cells,

And God forbid enamel,

Most creatures have them; like the orca whales,

Smiling takes 26 muscles,

People use it from Timbuktu to Brussels,

Call it inheritance or evolution,

Pedigree charts maybe,

Or DNA transfusions,

The science of a smile,

A hidden biological trial.

If one were to compile two little lists

of numbers that by simple rules abide,

the first that of all the odd primes consists

which when it is asked by 4 to divide

a remainder of 1 after it leave,

the second of those which together tied

in a sum as two squares one could conceive,

he would search for a difference in vain

for as far as he wants he would retrieve

always the same primes, again and again,

up to infinity, with no exception.

How can it be? This fact is too insane

to be coincidence, and the conception

of a proof dates back to three hundred years

ago, but this was the humble inception

of a research that led to what appears

nowadays as a vaster, richer field,

far more than what was seen behind the meres

of what XVII century revealed

to Pierre de Fermat, the mathematician

that still many stunning results did yield.

So often from an easy proposition,

investigating the remotest cause,

accumulating one good intuition

after another, without any pause,

generations of brilliant minds have found

under the former a deeper because,

a farther-reaching truth, a higher ground,

until vanquished all blindness strife by strife

human knowledge will even God astound.

This is mathematics, this is my life.