82 lines
4.0 KiB
Plaintext
82 lines
4.0 KiB
Plaintext
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 90 19:49:34 GMT
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From: ZDAP055@ELM.CC.KCL.ac.uk
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Subject: Strange loops...
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Sender: Traditional Nutty Stuff <NUTS@FINHUTC.bitnet>
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To: Joe Desbonnet <phydesbonnet@vax1.ucg.ie>
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Reply-to: ZDAP055@ELM.CC.KCL.ac.uk
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Comments: Warning -- original Sender: tag was zdap055@ELM.CC.KCL.AC.UK
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The author of this is "Pepsi"! <zdap194@uk.ac.kcl.cc.elm>
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All and any credit is due to him (as are the typo's: I can spell!)
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Enjoy people!
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IMPURE MATHEMATICS
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==================
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Once upon a time (1/t), pretty little Polly Nomial was strolling
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across a field of vectors when she came to the edge of a singlularly
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large matrix. Now Polly was convergent, and her mother had made it an
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absolute condition that she must never enter such an array without her
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brackets on.
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Polly, who had changed her variables that morning, was feeling
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particularly badly behaved, and ignored this condition on the grounds
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that it was insufficient and made her way amongst the complex
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elements. Rows and columns enveloped her on all sides. Tangents
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approached her surface. She became tensor and tensor. Quite suddenly,
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three branches of a hyperbola touched her at a single point. She
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oscillated violently, lost all sense of direction, and went copmletely
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divergent. As she reached a turning point, she tripped over a square
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root protruding from the erf, and plunged headlong down a steep
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gradient. When she was differentiated once more she found herself,
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apparently alone, in a non euclidean space.
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She was being watched, however. That smooth operator, Curly Pi, was
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lurking inner product. As his eyes devoured her curvilinear
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co-ordinates, a singular expression crossed his face. Was she still
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convergent, he wondered. He decided to integrate improperly at once.
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Hearing a vulgar fraction behind her, Polly turned and saw Curly Pi
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approaching with his power series extrapolated. She could see at once,
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by his degenerate conic and his dissipative terms that he was bent on
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no good.
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"Eureka!"she gasped.
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"Ho, ho!"he said,"What a symmetric litle polynomial you are. I can see you are
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bubbling over with secs."
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"O Sir,"she protested,"keep away from me, I haven't got my brackets on."
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"Calm yourself, my dear,"said our sauve operator,"Your fears are purely
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imaginary."
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"I,I,"she thought,"perhaps he's homogeneous then."
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"What order are you?"the brute demanded.
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"Seventeen,"repiled Polly.
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Curly leered. "I suppose you've never been operated on yet?" he asked.
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"Of course not!" Polly replied indignantly. "I'm absolutely convergent!"
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"Come, come," said Curly, "Let's off to a decimal place I know, and I'll take
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you to the limit!"
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"Never!" gasped Polly.
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"Induce the friction between Newton's Balls!" he swore, using the vilest oath
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he knew. His patience was gone. Coshing her over the head with a log until she
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was powerless, Curly removed her discontinuities. He started at her significant
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places and began removing her points of inflexion. Poor Polly. All was up. She
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felt his hand tend to her asymptotic limit. Her convergence would soon be gone
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forever. There was no mercy, for Curly was a heavy side operator. He integrated
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her by parts. He integrated her by partial fractions. The copmlex beast even
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went all the way round and did a contour integration. Curly went on operating
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until he was absolutely and completely orthogonal.
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When Polly got home that evening, her mother noticed that she had been
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truncated in several places and wondered whether her variables had been
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separated. But it was too late to differentiate now. As the months went by,
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Polly increased monotonically. Finally, she generated a small but pathological
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function which left surds all over the place until she was driven to
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distraction.
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The moral of this blown-out of proportion story is :"If you want to keep your
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expressions convergent, never allow them a single degree of freedom."
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............................................................PEPSI............
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