Smart People and Math Jokes

I just realized today that I hang around a lot of smart people. I think I do so, so I can try to feel like I am in kindred company. I don't think I'm very bright...sure, I'm a college grad, and I have both Microsoft's MCSE certification and Cisco's CCNA certifications...but, still. A chimp could pass the MCSE, and I know quite a few of what we call "Paper MCSEs"...people that just studied the books and tested, rather than having real-world experience to back up their certifications. I am rather proud of my Cisco certification, though. That was a tough one.

Anyhow, I was looking over geeky jokes this week, and sent my engineer friend RDW this...

Little Poly Nomial

Once upon a time 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 these conditions on the ground that they were unnecessary, and made her way amongst the complex elements.

Rows and columns enveloped her on both 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 which was protruding from the erf and plunged headlong down a steep gradient. When she was differentiated once more she found herself alone, apparently in a non-Euclidian space.

She was being watched however. That smooth operator, Curly Pi, was lurking inner product. As his eyes devoured her curvilinear co-ordinates, a singular expression crossed his face. Was she still convergent, he wondered. He decided to integrate at once.

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

"Eureka!" she gasped.

"Ho Ho," he said, "what a symmetric little polynomial you are. I can see you're absolutely 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 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 said.

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

"Come, come," said Curly, "lets 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 the coefficient with a log until she was powerless, Curly removed her discontinuities. He started at her significant places and began smoothing her points of inflection. Poor Polly, all was up. She felt his digit tending to her asymptotic limit. Her convergence was gone for ever.

There was no mercy, for Curly was a Heavyside operator. He integrated by partial fractions. The complex beast even went all the way round and did a contour integration. What an indignity. To be multiply connected at her first integration. Curly went on operating until he was absolutely and completely orthogonal.

When Polly got home that evening her mother noticed that she was truncated in several places. But it was too late to differentiate now. As the months went by, Polly 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 the story is this: If you want to keep your expressions convergent, never allow them a single degree of freedom.

Pretty funny, that. Such a horrible story line, but told in a geeky, funny way...I just had to laugh. RDW thought it was funny, but in his typical fashion, he had to come up with a corollary to the story...to make it a happy ending...

RDW's Response to Little Poly Nomial

All seemed truly lost. Poor Poly Nomial. Poor Bi Nomial! It seemed that there entire life was tied up in knots.

But then the mother of Poly Nomial, Bi Nomial, remembered that her husband, the father of Poly Nomial from whom Poly Nomial had been differentiated and derived would return home soon.

Multivariate Polynomial expanded into the space with a myriad of rational functions and all sorts of extensive sensitivity analysis.

Bi Nomial described the Poly Nomial conundrum and replicated the data into his cognizant set until the information was complete and congruent.

He knew that multivariate interpolation could resolve remainder formulas on interpolated knot sets. At Multivariate’s core expression, he knew that there must be a way to restore symmetry to Poly Nomial.

He remained unified and singular at his point of origin and hence was aware that the roots of any polynomial can always be expressed as multivariate hypergeometric functions. Poly Nomial was not just an arbitrary Poly Nomial. She had always been symmetric and rational and hence always consisted and expressed rational functions. Even the quotients of her derivative polynomials therefore must also be rational expressions. Any function that could be used to evaluate the situation at hand would evaluate rational expressions and hence would also be rational functions.

Multivariate decided to apply the Null Set, power sum symmetric polynomials, hyperbolic rational functions and complete homogeneous symmetric polynomials to the situation. Poly Nomial knew that she was being transformed, but was confident in Multivariate’s ability to neutralize dysfunctions and to restore rational functionality to he space. She began to experience an expansion of her matrix as Multivariate restored, applied and truncated her problems by exposing her to numerous infinite series, and by causing transformations rotations, inversions, permutations, combinations and transcendent functions.

This process indeed took time, but Multivariate increased the memory, expanded the bus width, increased the clock speed and utilized sets of multiple processors and coprocessors to minimize Poly Nomial's discomfort and divergence. Her problems were expanded to infinity. She began to experience a concept of googleplex. But just as she felt she was losing rationality, Multivariant dispersed the fragmented fractals into imaginary space and re-established singularity and unity.

Within mere moments, the infinite series had reached it asymptotic plane. All dysfunctions were normalized as the null set and imaginary space absorbed all discontinuities and hyperbolic space twisted the matrix back into normal Euclidian space once again. Poly Nomial's problems had all been transformed into imaginary expressions and sent to the void of the nulls set.

Poly Nomial was singular again with undefiled secs. Her brackets were restored and were symmetric again. Multivariate saved the day! And now there was little Quadrinomial that would need to be raised to a power. Multivariate, Bi and Poly were singular knowing that Quadrinomial could be raised to a power and could easily be integrated into their family regardless of the cause of his deviation and derivation.

All had been differentiated and normalized. The constants were clearly identified. Poly Nomial was rational and symmetric again.

And somewhere in the space, the sound of "Eureka" reverberated in the singularity.

Geniuses can have great senses of humor! I just wish I understood most of this stuff!