90 lines
4.2 KiB
Plaintext
90 lines
4.2 KiB
Plaintext
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=-=-=-= The Realm Of The Rogues =-=-=-=
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(415) 941-1990
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Impure Mathematics
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------ -----------
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To prove once and for all that math can be fun, we present: Impure Math!
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Wherein it is related how that paragon of womanly virtue, young Polly Nomial
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(our heroine) is accosted by that notorious villain Curly Pi, and factored (oh
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horror!!!)
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Once upon a time (1/t) pretty little Polly Nomial was strolling across a field
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of vectors when she came to the boundary of a singularly large matrix. Now
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Polly was convergent, and her mother had made it an absolute condition that she
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must never enter such an array without her brackets on. Polly, however, who had
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changed her variables that morning and was feeling particularly badly behaved,
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ignored this condition on the basis that it was insufficient and made her way in
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amongst the complex elements. Rows and columns closed in on her from all sides.
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Tangents approached her surface. She became tensor and tensor. Quite suddendly
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two branches of a hyperbola touched her at a single point. She oscillated
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violently, lost all sense of directrix, and went completely divergent. She
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tripped over a square root that was protruding from the erf and plunged headlong
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down a steep gradient. When she rounded off once more, she found herself
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inverted, apparently alone, in a non-Euclidean space.
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She was being watched, however, by that smooth operator, Curly Pi, who was a
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lurking inner product. As his eyes devoured her curvilinear coordinates, a
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singular expression crossed his face. He wondered, "Was she still convergent?"
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He decided to integrate properly at once.
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Hearing a common fraction behind her, Polly rotated and saw Curly Pi
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approaching with his power series extrapolated. She could see at once by his
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degenerate conic and dissipative that he was bent on no good
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"Arcsinh," she gasped.
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"Ho, ho," he said, "What a symmetric little asymptote you have. I can see you
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angles have lots of secs."
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"Oh sir," she protested, "keep away from me. I haven't got my brackets on."
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"Calm yourself, my dear," said our suave operator, "your fears are purely
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imaginary."
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"I, I," she thought, "perhaps he's not normal, but homologous."
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"What order are you?" the brute demanded.
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"Seventeen," replied Polly.
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Curly leered "I suppose you've never been operated on."
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"Of course not," Polly replied quite properly, "I'm absolutely convergent."
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"Come, come," said Curly, "let's go off to a decimal place I know and I'll
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take you to the limit."
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"Never," gasped Polly
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"Abscissa," he swore, using the vilest oath he knew.
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His patience was gone. Coshing her over the coefficient with a log until she
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was powerless, Curly removed her discontinuities. He stared at her significant
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places, and began smoothing out her points of inflection. Poor Polly. The
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algorithmic method was now her only hope. She felt his hand tending to her
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asymptotic limit. Her convergence would soon be gone forever.
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There was no mercy, for Curly was a heavyside operator. Curly's radius
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squared itself; Polly's loci quivered. He integrated by parts. He integrated
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by partial fractions. After he cofactored, he performed runge-kutta on her.
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The complex beast even went all the way around and did a contour integration.
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What an indignity - to be multiply connected on her first integration. Curly
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went on operating until he completely satisfied her hypothesis, then he
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exponentiated and became completely orthogonal.
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When Polly got home that night, her mother noticed that she was no longer
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piecewise continuous, but had been truncated in several places. But it was too
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late to differentiate now. As the months went by, Polly's denominator increased
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monotonically. Finally she went to L'Hopital and generated a small but
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pathological function which left surds all over the place and drove Polly to
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deviation.
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The moral of our sad story is this: "If you want to keep your expressions
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convergent, never allow them a single degree of freedom."
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=-=-=-= The Realm Of The Rogues =-=-=-=
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(415) 941-1990
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Call The Works BBS - 1600+ Textfiles! - [914]/238-8195 - 300/1200 - Always Open
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