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POLLY.TXT
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1988-07-29
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79 lines
Impure Mathematics
Wherein is related how that polygon of womanly virtue, young Polly Nomial
(our heroine) is accosted by that notorious villain ** Curly Pi **, and
factored (Oh horror!).
Once upon a time (1/T) pretty Polly Nomial was strolling across a
field of vectors when she came to the boundary of a singularly large
matrix. Now Polly was convergent, and her mother had made it an absolute
condition that she 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 basis that it was
insufficient, and made her way amongst the complex elements. Rows and
columns closed in from all sides. Tangents approached her surface. She
became tensor and tensor. Quite suddenly, two 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 that was protruding from the erf and plunged
headlong down a steep gradient. When she rounded off once more, she found
herself inverted, apparently alone, in a non-euclidean space.
She was being watched, however. That smooth operator Curly Pi was
lurking innerproduct. As his eyes devoured her curvilinear coordinates, a
singular expression crossed his face. He wondered, was she still
convergent? He decided to integrate improperly at once. Hearing a common
fraction behind her, polly rotated and saw Curly Pi approaching with his
power series extrapolated. She could see at once by his degenerative conic
and dissipative terms that he was bent on no good.
"Arcsinh!", she gasped.
"Ho ho", he said. "What a symmetric little asymptote you have. I
can see your angles have a lot 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 not normal, but homologous."
"What order are you?" the brute demanded. "Sevtenteen", replied
Polly.
Curly leered. "I suppose you've never been operated on."
"Of course not," Polly replied quite properly, "I'm absolutely
convergent."
"Come, come", said Curly Pi. "Let's 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 smooting out her points of inflection. Poor Polly. The
algorithmic method was now her only hope. 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-cutta on her. The complex beast even went all the way around and did
a contour integration. Curly went on operating until he had satisfied her
hypothesis, then exponentiated and became completely orthogonal.
When Polly returned that night to her point of origin, her mother
noticed that she was no longer piecewise continuous, but had been truncated
in several places. It was too late to differentiate now. As the months
went by, Polly's denominator increased monotonically. Finally, she went to
L'Hopital and generated a small but pathological function which left surds
all over the place and drove Polly to deviation.
The moral of this sad story is this:
'If you want to keep your expressions convergent,
never allow them a single degree of freedom...'