A Duffian Tale

I wrote this poem in honor of Iain Duff, and recited it at the 20th Anniversary meeting of CERFACS, in Toulouse, France, where I did my post-doc with Iain. This poem includes all 70 of Iain's co-authors (via journal papers or authored books, but not tech reports or editted books), in either pun or by topic, or both. Patrick Amestoy took a video of the recital at the conference banquet ... I will post it soon, here.

-ian: belonging to, relating to, typical of, follower of, expert in, partisan of. Thus, a co-author of Iain Duff is a duffian.

If you like this poem, you can find more fun poems at Horror Matrices and Other Mathematical Poetry, and in particular, Ode to a Matrix. Click here for an index of my serious poetry.

Listen to my rendition (MP3 file, about 6 minutes long).

A Duffian Tale, by Tim Davis

We're the partisans of Iain Duff, the pirate mans of duffian, and gals thar too do write the code and take thar part upon this ode.

I'll sing for you a long C chanty, or in Fortran certainantly. The sails are full, so let's get coding earli in the morning. We duffians hail from far and wide, many do come from CERFACS side, others swept in against the tide.

This here be the sparsest tale, of duffian feats for which we hail. Our ship's set sail against a gale, of matrices beyond the pale.

Duff, Erisman, and Reid : their tome will help your code to speed. Nowhere can England's navy hide or keep our code from London's tide. Against Her Royal MI5 : Reid's MA 1 to 95.

Arioli's errs are lowly, backward stable thar they be, for Demmel's static pivotin', Pralet scalin' hooks a' grapplin'.

Amestoy, Davis: navigators, keep degree's approximators. Amestoy is our medic too, against your MUMPS or C-sick flu; Medic most L'Excellent.

MATLAB slash, backslash we claim; sparse Duffian Davisian: Matrix left and right division.

Koster's diagonal will cost yer, our largest ones permuted thar. Jiminez and Cardenal are great with quasi-rectangular.

Dongarra, Du Croz do BLAS done grand, code hammers hard with Hammarling. The speed they goes is startling, when in sparse codes they're firmly set, by mates Daydé and Petitet. Radicati and Vittoli : do BLAS 3 in software sparsely.

A sea-sick ail are not the BLAS, they keep your code from gettin' blahs. And sparsely too you may just find them, with Vömel , Pozo, our Heroux, for sparse BLAS too they're our heroes.

Our cannon's primed and point to sea on deck levels one two three. A hardy crew of coders who (in Fortran code canonical are quick at all things nautical) man the BLAS all levels through (a crew who get antsy at sea if told to code in ANSI C): Blackford, Demmel, Dongarra, Duff, Gimme no gruff, the sea's are rough. Hammarling, Henry, and Heroux, fire the cannon BLAS, they do. Kaufman, Lumsdaine, and Petitet, (there's more to go, I'm not done yet). Pozo, Remington, and Whaley (has their code updated lately?).

Puglisi codes orthogonally, Wathen, Bai just incompletely, Papadopoulos does all. Reid with speed goes multifrontal; Scott goes fast with just one frontal.

Some work most indefinitely: Gould, Reid, Scott, and Turner do; Munksgaard and Neilsen's 2-by-2. Matrix eigens not just one side; some on one and some on two.

Then there's always been a few, as ne'er finish their solution, but solve most indirectly. All eyes on us; Noailles does this, with Ruiz, Drummond, Sadkane too; rue the ease by which they sieze solution's low resid.

Them that does this iteration, require matrix good condition. Carpentieri, Giraud, Langou, and also Martin who do fashion low rank sparsely precondition.

In multigrid with hearty passion, Pinel, Gratton precondition. Magolu monga Made a pre condition e-lectricity. Nocedal and Reid we trust, for regions nonlinear and such.

Lam'nie, Lichnewsky, Thomasset, do matrices and their solution, and find an answer sure, you bet, with one or many bits precision.

Watch yourself and keep, I fear, index finger from stuctural Gear, that hoists the sails without a tear.

Nowak solves stiff ODE's, to keep the sails taut in the breeze. Kahaner does things circuiteze, and simulates them all with ease.

Wiberg assigned to crow's nest high, Sylvand climbs too the multipole. We searched th' entire Mere Antilles for orderings; Meurant, where is he's?

In Li of port a storm came up. The Vasseur Poole'd below the decks, the crew were sure we'd be a wrecks, when our ship's keel was nearly Björk against de Rijk and sea-side Cliffe.

Pirate Dave was struck by wave, and swept into the sea. "I cannot breath, I need Morére!" A cry above the waves' despair. Our Langou boat we cut it loose, to save him from the wrathful brine.

We feared our mighty ship was done, on desert isle we'd be Marrone'd. Yet when the stormy clouds did pass and van der Vorst vas over, on the decks we lay exhausted; Sorensen'seless was the crew.

Our treasure's kept by Grimes and Lewis, their matrices to all they loan us, They're open source; please don't sue us. Just keep 'em coming, matrice send to us.

Thar they be, a pirate crew, we duffians number quite a few, Gentle lads and lasses all, named in this tale long and tall. Not one of us are malefactors, we just love them LU factors. Since we work with Duff, Iain, ... None a duffian is a ruffian.