Pretty Little Polynomial and Curly Pi

Once upon a time (1/t) pretty little Polly Nomial was strolling across a field o
f vectors when she came to the boundary of a singularly large matrix. Now Polly
was convergent, and her mother had made it an absolute condition that she must n
ever, ever enter such an array without her brackets on. Polly, however, who had
changed her variables that morning and was feeling particularly badly behaved, i
gnored this condition on the basis that it was insufficient, and made her way in
amongst the complex elements.
Rows and columns closed in on her from all sides. Tangents approached her surfac
e, and she became tenser and tenser. Quite suddenly, two branches of a hyperbola
touched her at a single point. She oscillated violently, became unstable, lost
all sense of directrix, tripped over a square root that was protruding from the
erf, and plunged headlong down a steep gradient. She was completely divergent by
the time she reached the turning point. When she rounded off once more, she fou
nd herself inverted, apparently alone in a non-euclidean space.
She was being watched, however. That smooth operator, Curly Pi, was lurking inne
r product. As his eyes devoured her curvilinear coordinates, a singular expressi
on crossed his face. He wondered, was she convergent? He decided to integrate im
properly at once.
Hearing a common fraction behind her, Polly rotated and saw Curly Pi approaching
with his lower series extended. She could see at once his degenerate conic and
his dissipative terms, and knew he was irrational. "Arcsinh!" she gasped.
"Hey, what's your sine?" he asked. "What a symmetric set of asymptotes you have!
"
"Stay away from me!" she protested. "I haven't got any brackets on!"
"Calm yourself, my dear!" said the smooth operator.. "Your fears are purely imag
inary."
"i, i, ..." she thought, "Perhaps he's not normal, but homologous."
"What order are you?" the brute suddenly demanded.
"Seventeen," replied Polly.
Curly leered, "I suppose you've never been operated upon?"
"Of course not. I'm absolutely convergent!" Polly replied quite properly.
"Come on," said Curly: "Let's go to decimal place I know of, and I'll take you t
o the limit."
"Never!" gasped Polly..
"Abscissa!" he swore a violent oath. Coshing her over the coefficient with a log
until she was powerless, Curly removed her discontinuities. He stared at her si
gnificant places, and began smoothing her points of inflection. Poor Polly Nomia
l! The algorithm method was now her only hope. She felt him approaching her asym
ptotic limit. Her convergence would soon be gone forever. There was no mercy; Cu
rly was a heavy side operator. His radius squared itself and Polly's loci quiver
ed. He integrated by parts. He integrated by partial fractions. After he cofacto
red, he performed Runge-Kutta on her. He even went all the way around and did a
contour integration. Curly went on operating until he satisfied her hypotheses,
then he exponentiated and became completely orthogonal.
When Polly got home that night, her mother noticed that she was no longer piecew
ise continuous, but had been truncated in several places. But it was too late to
differentiate now. As the months went by, Polly's denominator increased monoton
ically. Finally, they took her to L'Hopital and generated a small but pathologic
al function which left surds all over the place and drove Polly to deviation.
The moral of this tale is: "If you want to keep your expressions convergent, nev
er allow them a single degree of freedom."
Now that's what I call getting your Mathematical Pundamentals right.