About this
piece: I wrote this during math class. You probably won't
understand most of this unless you've just taken Algebra II.
Also, there is one thing you must know in order to read this:
The triple meaning of "Hark"
1. Listen!
2. A parabola (courtesy Alexis
Braverman)
3. The name of the main character of this story.
Hark! Continuing his adventures through the land of forgotten formulae, Hark, the parabolic explorer, found himself lost in a world of right triangles and theta angles. Little sines, cosines, and gremlins gathered around him. “What is this place?” he shouted in despair.
A little elf with an unexpected British accent spoke up. “My good man, you’ve stumbled into Triggyland. My name is Triggy.”
“Hark! How did I get here?” asked our brave adventurer, while brushing off some thorny cosecants at his side.
“You must have been traversing the Valley of the Logarithms when you made a wrong rotation, and somehow arrived here.” Triggy then disappeared into the brush. Hark was left along in a strange land, with no one to guide him. But Hark was not afraid. No, Hark set forth to explore the land.
Nothing could prepare Hark for what happened next. Quadrantal angles let out a loud battle-cry. Hark turned, but it was too late. (0,1) came in from the north, (0,-1) from the south, among others from all sides. The end was imminent for the great adventurer, until he noticed their weakness. “(0,1),” he cried, “What’s your tangent?”
Suddenly, that angle from the north broke down. “I-” it trembled, “I don’t have one!”
“And yours?” Hark asked the one from the south. It too stopped, and fell to the ground in anguish. Rather than destroy the self esteem of the others, the adventurer sprinted away. He ran and ran, and didn’t stop until he came upon the miserable reference angle. Suddenly, Triggy appeared.
“My, my,” Triggy lamented. “That poor reference angle. You see, ol’ chum, the angle just wants to become great. It circles the origin repeatedly, in hopes of growing like other angles. Alas, it is just a reference angle, and it is doomed never to be even as large as 90 degrees. It is doomed to failure.”
“Damn x-axis,” Hark muttered, “ruining the life of an innocent reference angle.”
Triggy gasped. Hark wondered what happened. Triggy raised his fist and said, “Thou hast spoken ill of the x-axis! Nobody denounces the great x-axis!” He lunged forward at Hark, who jumped away in time. He started to run away.
He sprinted across the Fields of Amplitude, where centegrees began to attack him. “There’s no such thing as centegrees!” he shouted. For the first time in their lives, the centegrees realized they don’t exist, and they promptly exploded.
Our courageous discoverer hopped onto his boat, and sailed away from Triggyland. From the shore, Triggy shouted, “You may have escaped Triggyland, but you’ll never make it through the dark dungeons of Calculus!”