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 approached
her
surface. She became tensor and tensor. Suddenly two
branches of a
hyperbola touched her at a single point. She oscillated
violently, lost
all sense of direction, and went completely divergent. As she
reached a
turning point she tripped over a square root that was protruding from
the erf, and she 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 he numerically analyzed her, his eyes
devoured her curvilinear coordinates, and a singular expression crossed
his face. Was she still convergent, he wondered. He decided to
integrate improperly at once.
Hearing a common fraction behind her, Polly rotated and saw Curly
approaching her with his power series expanding. She could see by
his
degenerate conic that he was up to no good.
"What a symmetric little polynomial you are," he said. "I can see
that
your angles have lots of 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."