Once upon a time, pretty Polly Nomial was skipping through 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 never
entered such an array without her brackets on. But Polly had changed her
variables that morning and had been feeling particularly badly behaved, she
ignored her mothers's condition on the grounds that it was insufficient, and
made her way in among the complex elements.
Rows and columns enveloped her on all sides. Tangents approached her
surface. She grew tensor and tensor. Quite suddenly, three branches of a
hyperbola touched her at a single point, she oscillated wildly and lost all
sense of directrix. She tripped over a square root protruding from the erf,
and tumbled headlong down a steep gradient. When she was once again in
possesion of her variables, she found herself apparently in a non-euclidean
space. She was being watched, however: that smooth operator, Curly Pi, was
lurking inner product. As his eyes devoured her curvilinear coordinates, a
singular expression crossed his face. Was she convergent? He wondered. He
decided to integrate improperly at once. Hearing an improper fraction behind
her, Polly rotated and saw Curly approaching with his power series
extrapolated. She could tell at once from his degenerate conic and his
dissipative terms that he was bent to no good.
``Eureka!'' she gasped.
``Ho,ho,'' said our operator. ``What a symetric little asymptote you have. I
bet your angles are just dripping with secs.''
``Stay away from me!'' she said. ``I haven't got my brackets on.''
``Calm yourself, my dear,'' he said. ``Your fears are purely imaginary.''
``I, I,'' she thought, ``Maybe he's not normal..Maybe he's even a
homomorphism.''
``What order are you?'' the brute demanded.
``Seventeen,'' she replied.
Curly leered. ``Enough of this idle chatter. Lets go to a decimal place I
know, and I'll take you to the limit.''
``Never!'' she gasped.
``Arcsinh!!!'' He swore the vilest oath he knew. 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 out
her points of inflection. Poor Polly. She could feel his hand tending towards
her asymptotic limit. The algorithmic method was now her only hope. Her
convergence would soon be gone forever.
Curly's radius squared itself. Polly's loci quivered. He intergrated by
parts. He intergrated by partial fractions. The complex beast even went all
the way around and did a contour intergration. Curly went on operating until
he was completely and totally exhausted of all his primitive roots.
When Polly arrived home that night, her mother noticed that she had been
truncated in several places. But it was too late to differentiate now. Nine
transformations later, she went to L'Hopital and generated a small but
pathological function which left zeros and residues all over the place and
drove poor Polly to deviation.
The moral of this story is: If you want to keep your expressions
convergent, keep them well differentiated from complex operators.
\_ "intergrated"? |