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.