Science quite often influences, or even gives birth to, poetry. This includes science written as poetry, poets complaining about or making fun of scientists, scientists having fun with science, and other variations.
Here are some examples, collected over time, in no particular order:
Mathematicians
i) Bhaskaracharya (1114–1185), who wrote his Lilavati (apparently his daughter), a collection of mathematical problems, in verse. My Sanskrit is no longer good enough - if it ever was - to follow the original. Translations are available in other languages; some of these do not preserve the poetry.
ii) Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson; 1832-1898) lectured on mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford. He is famous for writing books like Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. In the latter appears the poem The Walrus and the Carpenter, which is amusing of its own accord, but also will be relevant below.
Astronomers
i) Eratosthenes (~250 BC), a Greek savant, calculated, among other things, the circumference of the Earth. His sieve, for finding prime numbers, is also famous. He also wrote poems such as Hermes and Erigone.
ii) Omar Khayyam (1048-1131), a polymath from Persia, made contributions to both science and poetry. He wrote one of my favorite poems of all time, the Rubaiyyat (Edward Fitzgerald translation), which I can quote here without copyright worries as it is in the public domain.
A sample quatrain about the confusing nature of the universe:
"Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same door where in I went."
iii) Walt Whitman (1819-1892), the poet whose work When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer is often quoted by those miffed with science [I should perhaps says astronomy specifically -:)].
iv) W H Williams (1881-1959), a physicist at Berkeley, who was around at the time Eddington was visiting the place, wrote The Einstein and the Eddington, and read it out at the farewell party for Eddington. I find it very amusing and a masterful adaptation of Lewis Carroll's The Walrus and the Carpenter, mentioned above. I first came across this poem in the book Truth and Beauty by S. Chandrashekhar.
Physicists
i) Lucretius (99-55 BC), the scientist who famously discussed the constitution of the universe in terms of atoms and the void in his long poem On the Nature of Things.
ii) James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), the unifier of electromagnetic theory, wrote poetry extensively and often amusingly. A number of his poems - some of them about physics - are available here.
iii) William Wordsworth (1770-1850), the famous English romantic poet, gets a mention here, for his lines on Newton in The Prelude.
iv) John Updike (1932-2009). Famous American writer. Try his short poem on neutrinos.
Chemists
Humphry Davy (1778-1829) the English chemist who invented the minor's lamp and discovered Michael Faraday, was friends with poets such as Wordsworth, Lord Byron and Coleridge. He also wrote quite a bit himself. Here's one, about breathing nitrous oxide.
Biologists/doctors
i) Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802). I checked to see if Charles Darwin had written any poetry. I could not find anything by him, but in the process learnt that his physician grandfather, Erasmus, wrote a lot of it. There's a long one, called the The Botanic Garden.
ii) Ronald Ross (1875-1932), the British medical doctor who discovered that malaria was transmitted by mosquitoes and received the Nobel prize in Medicine in 1902 for it. He also wrote a fair bit of poetry, including one after making his malarial discovery, which is quoted here. (Apparently the book The Calcutta Chromosome is partially based on Ross).
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