From the            
                        JOKIN' AROUND DISK    
                               by               
                        LEEJAN ENTERPRISES    
                     P.O. Box 66. Happy Valley.
                       South Australia. 5159.  



Once  upon a time (1/T),  pretty Polly Nomial was strolling  across  a 
field  of  vector  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, had changed her variables that  moring  and  was 
feeling  particularly  badly behaved, ignored this  condition  on  the 
grounds  that  it  was insufficient, and made her  way  in  among  the 
complex elements.

Rows  and columns enveloped her on all sides. Tangents approached  her 
surface.  Polly  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 down a steep gradient.  When 
Polly  was  differentiated once more, she  found  herself,  apparently 
alone, in a non-Euclidian space.

She  was being watched, however. That smooth operator, Curly  Pi,  was 
lurking   inner  product.  As  his  eyes  devoured   her   curvilinear 
coordinates,  a  singular expression crossed his face. Was  she  still 
convergent,  he  wondered? Curly decided to  integrate  improperly  at 
once!

Hearing a vulgar fraction behind her, Polly turned round and saw Curly 
Pi  approching  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," Curly said. "What a symmetric little pollynomial you are!  I 
can see that you're bubling 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 thought. "Perhaps he's homogenous, then."

"What order are you?" The brute demanded.

"Seventeen," replied Polly.

Curly leered. "I suppose you've never been operated on yet," he said.

"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.  Curly's  patience 
was gone. Coshing her over the coefficient with a log until Polly  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 fractions. 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 was absolutely and completely orthogonal.

When Polly got home, her mother noticed that she had been truncated in 
several places, but it was to 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 diffraction.

The  moral  of  our  sad  story is this: If  you  want  to  keep  your 
expressions convergent, never allow them a single degree of freeedom.


                  
	                     From the            
                        JOKIN' AROUND DISK    
                               by               
                        LEEJAN ENTERPRISES    
                     P.O. Box 66. Happy Valley.
                       South Australia. 5159.