Posted on 02/23/2018 10:17:35 AM PST by TigerClaws
Updated 2 hours 51 minutes ago A discussion among students at Oberlin High School in Oberlin, La., about a mathematical symbol led to a police investigation and a search of one of the student’s homes, according to the Allen Parish Sheriff’s Office.
On the afternoon of Feb. 20, detectives investigated a report of terroristic threats at the school, where they learned that a student had been completing a math problem that required drawing the square-root sign.
Students in the group began commenting that the symbol, which represents a number that when multiplied by itself equals another number, looked like a gun.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article201604224.html#storylink=cpy
(Excerpt) Read more at miamiherald.com ...
A classic (I remember it from the mainframe I used in college):
Impure Mathematics
In George H. Scherr, ed. The Best of The Journal of Irreproducible Results, p.147. Workman Publishing, 1983
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. Quite suddenly, three 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, apparently alone, 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 still convergent, he wondered. He decided to integrate improperly at once.
Hearing a vulgar function 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 bubbling over with secs”.
“O 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 homogenous then?”.
“What order are you,” the brute demanded.
“Seventeen,” replied Polly.
Curly leered. “I suppose you’ve never been operated on yet?” he asked.
“Of course not”, Polly cried indignantly. “I’m absolutely convergent.”
“Come, come,” said Curly. “Let’s 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 stared at her significant places and began to smooth her points of inflexion. Poor Polly. All was up. She felt his hand tending to her asymptotic limit. Her convergence would soon be gone forever.
There was no mercy, for Curly was a heavyside operator. He integrated by parts. He integrated by partial fractions. The complex beast even went all the way around and did a contour integration. What an indignity. To be multiply connected on 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 had been 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 this sad story is this: If you want to keep your expressions convergent, never allow them a single degree of freedom.
Those that refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Yep, and it is TOTALLY LEGAL!...................
Legal perhaps, but I would need some training in its use! They were just a bit before my time, but they sure are an ingenious device.
As an engineer I’m quite aware of that, thank you.
Next CNN headline: “Eliminating square roots: A radical solution”
(A little math humor there.)
A 3 kinda looks like a pitchfork pointed sideways. Just saying.
High school students in Louisiana do not know what the symbol for square root of a number is? This is shameful. Teachers must be really deficient if these children in high school do not know what this symbol means by the time they get there, the grade school teachers should be fired. What it says is that there is no attention to teaching math in Louisiana.
This is one of the most disgusting articles I have read in awhile. Only ignorance of a most total obliterative kind could even see a “gun” in a square root symbol. The school officials ought to be replaced as ignorance at that level is inexcusable. The poor kid and his parents...Lordy. Just unbelievable. The parents and the child should get a letter of apology. Period. That kid that made what was or wasn’t a threat should be talked with to determine why he or she would make such a remark.
The whole affair smacks of hysteria. And that is not typical of LA. What has happened down there to create such pansies?
President Camacho need to put a stop to this square root thing
You don't want to be out there denigrating either.
No, this is not satire.
DANG!
This has to be joke.
You have made my point
Few will exert the effort and sacrifice you have
That’s why there will never be universal homeschooling
I salute you.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.