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