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Impure mathematics Math parody HUMOR
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Impure Mathematics
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Reprint from a 1967 edition of California Engineer
Once upon a time (1/t) pretty little Polly Nomial was strolling across a
field of vectors when she came to the edge 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 grounds that it
was insufficient and made her way in amongst the complex elements.
Rows and columns enveloped her on all sides. Tangents approached her
surface. She became tensor and tensor. Quite suddenly, three branches of a
hyperbola touched her at a single point. She oscillated violently, lost all
sense of directrix and went completely divergent. As she reached a turning
point she tripped over a square root which was protruding from the erf and
plunged headlong down a steep gradient. When she was differentiated once
more she found herself, apparently alone, in a non-Euclidean space.
She was being watched however. That smooth operator, Curly Pi, was lurking
inner product. As his eyes devoured her curvilinear co-ordinates a singular
expression crossed his face. Was she still convergent, he wondered. He
decided to integrate improperly at one.
Hearing a vulgar fraction behind her Polly turned round and saw Curly Pi
approaching with his power series extrapolated. She could see at once, by
his degenerate conic and his dissipative terms that he was bent on no good.
"Eureka!" she gasped.
"Ho, Ho!" he said. "What a symmetric little polynomial you are. I can see
you're absolutely bubbling over with secs."
"O 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 though. "Perhaps he's homogeneous then?"
"What order are you?" the brute demanded.
"Seventeen," replied Polly.
Curly leered. "I suppose you've never been operated on yet?" he asked.
"Of course not," Polly cried indignantly. "I'm absolutely convergent."
"Come, come," said Curly. "Let's off to a decimal place I know and I'll
take you to the limit."
"Never!" gasped Polly.
"EXCHLF!" 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 her points of inflection. Poor Polly. All was up. 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. He integrated by
parts. He integrated by partial fractions. The complex beast even went all
the way round and did a contour integration. What an indignity! To be
multiply connected on her first integration. Curly went on operating until
he was absolutely and completely orthogonal.
When Polly got home that evening her mother noticed that she had been
truncated in several places. But it was too late to differentiate now. As
the months went by, Polly increased monotonically. Finally she generated a
small but pathological function which left surds all over the place until
she was driven to distraction.
The moral of out sad story is this: if you want to keep you expressions
convergent, never allow them a single degree of freedom.
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