The Loony Bin
(
loonies@bloodaxe.demon.co.uk
)
Fri, 15 Mar 1996 18:25:31 +0000
Hiya again folks... This may be beyond one or two of you (sorry history and drama people...life's like that...) but the rest of you should cope...:-) Wishes & Dreams...:-) - ANDREA xx -- ************<andrea@bloodaxe.demon.co.uk>************ ******************<ajc6@ukc.ac.uk>******************* *** *** *** THE LOONY BIN *** *** loonies@bloodaxe.demon.co.uk *** *** *** ***************************************************** **********************ANDROMEDA********************** ------- Forwarded message follows ------- 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 particularly badly behaved, ignored this condition on the grounds that it was insufficient, and made her way in amongst the complex elements. Rows and columns enveloped her on all sides. Tangents touched 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 down a steep gradient, landing on her saddle-point. When she was differentiated once more, she found herself, apparently alone, in a non-Euclidean space. But she was being watched. That smooth operator, Curly Pi, was lurking inner product. As his eyes alighted on her curvilinear coordinates, 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 by his degenerate conic and his dissipative terms that he was bent on doing no good. "Eureka," she gasped. "Ho Ho," he said. "What a symmetrical little polynomial you are. I can see you're positively bubbling over with 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 tears are purely imaginery." "Aye Aye," she thought. "Perhaps he's homogenous 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 seductively. "Let's go off to a decimal place I know and I'll take you to the limit." "Never!" gasped Polly. "Exchif!" he swore, using the vilest oath he knew. His patience was gone. Coshing her over the coefficient with 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 Heaviside operator. He integrated by parts. He integrated by partial fractions. The complex beast even went right the way round and did a double contour integration. What a catastrophe! To be multiplicatively connected on her first integration. Curly went on operating until he was completely and utterly orthogonal. When Polly got home that evening, her mother noticed that she had been truncated in several places, but it was too late to differentiate now. Polly soon realised that she was no longer periodic and that she had started to increase monotonically. Several months later, she generated a small but pathological function which left surds all over the place until she was driven to distraction. The moral of our sad story is this: if you want to keep your expressions convergent, never allow them a single degree of freedom. -- David Clarke