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
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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
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