Article 1396 of eunet.jokes: Path: santra!tut!draken!kth!enea!mcvax!ukc!etive!glasgow!browndf From: browndf@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Deryck F Brown) Newsgroups: eunet.jokes Subject: Impure Maths (LONG) Message-ID: <1919@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> Date: 22 Nov 88 11:52:53 GMT Distribution: eunet Organization: Computing Sci, Glasgow Univ, Scotland Lines: 76 Here's an article I got a copy of from a friend in the Maths Dept. I thought it was sufficiently funny that everyone would enjoy it. (Although it helps if you understand some maths 8-)) Deryck ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ IMPURE MATHS 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 that condition on the grounds that it was sufficient and made her way among the complete 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 fom the erf and plunged headlong down a steep gradient. When she 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 co-ordinates a singular expression crossed his face. Was she still convergent he wondered. He decided to integrate improperly at once. 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 imaginery". "i,i" she thought, "perhaps he is homogeneous then." "What order are you?" the brute demanded. "Seventeen," replied Polly. Curly leered, "I suppose you've never been operated on yet". "Of course not," Polly cried indignantly, "I absolutley convergent". "Come, come," said Curly, "Let's go to a decimal place I know and I'll take you to the limit." "Never!" gasped Polly. His patience was gone. Coshing her over the coefficient with a log until she was powerless, Curly removed her discontinuities. He stared at her proportional parts and significant places. He then began smoothing her points of inflection and 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 functions. The complex beast even went all the way round and did a contour integration. What an indiginity! To be multiply connected on her first integration. Curly went on operating until he was absolutely and completely orthogonal! (Derived by Chris Bollinger) -- Deryck Brown Try one browndf@cs.glasgow.ac.uk Computing Science Student of these browndf@uk.ac.glasgow.cs ...!mcvax!ukc!glasgow!browndf ===============================================================================