Two Mathematicians

In 1953, two mathematicians met
In a restricted security area
Of the Walter Reed Army Hospital;
One was dying of bone cancer,
The other came to cheer him up.

They were famous
Though not for their mathematics,
Beautiful as it was;
The security was there because
One invented the computer
And the other the nuclear bomb.

They came from provincial cities
Of the Austro-Hungarian Empire;
Their math had saved them
From what happened to their families.

To distract his friend from pain
The visitor picked up a book
Lying on the night table
And read in the original Greek,
They both remembered from their youth,
The Melian dialogue--a tale
Of the strong and the weak
And their confrontation
Twenty three hundred years ago.

You can, if you wish, connect the dots
Between the dialogue and the bomb;
I, for one, wish that my high school
Left me something, anything,
To comfort a dying friend with.