Radia Perlman, the inventor of the algorithm summarised it in the form of a poem, titled “Algorhyme”: Her poem was modified from the original entitled “Trees”, by the American poet Joyce Kilmer.
I think that I shall never see
A graph more lovely than a tree.
A tree whose crucial property
Is loop-free connectivity.
A tree which must be sure to span.
So packets can reach every LAN.
First the Root must be selected
By ID it is elected.
Least cost paths from Root are traced
In the tree these paths are placed.
A mesh is made by folks like me
Then bridges find a spanning tree.
Thanks to Parisch Browne for this one!