[3021] in Humor
HUMOR:little polly
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Freak on a Leash)
Thu Nov 25 23:39:51 1999
Date: Thu, 25 Nov 1999 23:38:48 -0500 (EST)
From: Freak on a Leash <descentr@MIT.EDU>
To: humor@MIT.EDU, alottaotherppl@MIT.EDU
thanx to /mit/zacheiss/Public.
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. Suddenly two branches of
a hyperbola touched her at a single point. She oscillated violently,
lost all sense of direction, and went completely divergent. As she
reached a turning point she tripped over a square root that was
protruding from the erf, and she 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 he numerically analyzed her, his eyes
devoured her curvilinear coordinates, and a singular expression
crossed his face. Was she still convergent, he wondered. He decided
to integrate improperly at once. Hearing a common fraction behind
her, Polly rotated and saw Curly approaching her with his power series
expanding. She could see by his degenerate conic that he was up to no
good.
"What a symmetric little polynomial you are," he said. "I can
see that your 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 homogeneous."
"What order are you?" the brute demanded.
"Seventeen," replied Polly.
"I suppose you've never been operated on?"
"Of course not," Polly cried indignantly. "I'm absolutely
convergent."
"Come, come," said Curly. "Let's go off to a decimal place, 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 head 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. 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. Curly went on operating until
he 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.
As the months went by, Polly's denominator increased monotonically.
Finally she went to l'Hospital and generated a small but pathological
function which left little surds all over the place and drove Polly to
deviation. The moral of the story is, "If you want to keep your
expressions convergent, never allow them a single degree of freedom."
--[1242]--
