Rachel’s Thoughts: The Poetic Math Problem

For Rhetoric last week, one of our assignments was to describe a math problem in a poetic fashion. 🙂

“The 17 sat there, creased at his corner like my grandmother’s eye, arms crossed and leaning against the parenthesis beside him. The parenthesis wrapped its arms around the function within, hugging the Cosine-and Sine-of-X in a tight grasp. The Cosine-of-X and her husband, the Sine-of-X, huddled close together, trying to evade the parentheses’ cold hands. The Tangent-of-X giggled beside the parentheses, beaming at her brother, t, and their little nephew 2, who sat perched on t’s shoulder.

The family of functions sat atop a line like children on a curb, and their pet 9 sat beneath them. The 9 sat, smugly aloof but interested despite her own better judgement. Brackets enclosed the complex family, but various functional family members stood nearby. On the left of the bracket were Secant X and Cosecant X, Cosine-of-X’s twin sisters. They had both been born upside down, and it was still a touchy subject.

The family’s skeleton-in-the-closet, Great-Uncle Z, stood with his girlfriend, 3, on the other side of The Barrier; Z looked frightfully knobby beside his curvy friend. The proper side of the family, the functions of X and the basic numbers, had been trying to get Z and 3 out of the equation for a while, and subtraction had been the farthest away they could get them without making Great-Uncle Z undefined. However, despite the family’s attempts, Z and 3 still managed to turn up every time they tried to solve the family problems, and frequently made the hired solver pound his head into the desk in mental agony.”