From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!npois!pcl
Newsgroups: net.jokes.q
Title: Pretty Polynumial
Article-I.D.: npois.1391
Posted: Thu Jun 24 16:45:26 1982
Received: Mon Jun 28 01:12:05 1982

The following is the porno-math story that ...!nsc!katic asked for:

IMPURE MATHEMATICS

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 particularyly badly behaved,
ignored this condition on the grounds that it was insufficient and
made her way in amoungst the complex 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 from the erf and 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 his eyes devoured her curvillinear
coordinates, a singular expression crossed his face.  Was she
still convergent, he wondered.  He decided to integrate imporperly
at once.

Hearing a vulgar fraction behind her, Polly turned round and was Curly Pi
approaching with his power series extrapolated.  She could see at once
by his degenerate conic sections and his dessipative terms, that he
was bent on no good.

"Eureka," she gasped.

"Ho, ho," he said.  "What a symetric little polynomial you are.  I can
see that you're 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 imaginary."

"I, I," she thought, "perhaps he's homogeneous then."

"What order are you?" the brute demanded.

"Seventeen," replied Polly.

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

"Of course not," Polly cried indignantly, "I'm absolutely convergent."

"Come, come," said Curly.  "Let's go 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.  His patience was
gone.  Coshing her over 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.  All was up.
She felt his hand tending to her asymptotic limit.  Her convergence
would soon be gone for ever.

There was no mercy, for Curly was a heavyside operator.  He integrated
by parts.  He integrated by partial fractions.  The complex beast even
went all the way around and did a contour integration.  Curly went
on operating until he was absolutely and completely orthogonal.

When Polly got home that evening, her mother noticed that she
had been truncated in several places.  But it was too late to
differectiate now.  As two months went by, Poly increased
monotonically.  Finally she generated a small but pathological
function which left surds all over the place until she was driven
to distraction.

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