The Tachypomp and Other Stories

A Mathematical Demonstration

There was nothing mysterious about Professor Surd's dislike for me. I
was the only poor mathematician in an exceptionally mathematical
class. The old gentleman sought the lecture-room every morning with
eagerness, and left it reluctantly. For was it not a thing of joy to
find seventy young men who, individually and collectively, preferred x
to XX; who had rather differentiate than dissipate; and for whom the
limbs of the heavenly bodies had more attractions than those of
earthly stars upon the spectacular stage?

So affairs went on swimmingly between the Professor of Mathematics and
the junior Class at Polyp University. In every man of the seventy the
sage saw the logarithm of a possible La Place, of a Sturm, or of a
Newton. It was a delightful task for him to lead them through the
pleasant valleys of conic sections, and beside the still waters of the
integral calculus. Figuratively speaking, his problem was not a hard
one. He had only to manipulate, and eliminate, and to raise to a
higher power, and the triumphant result of examination day was
assured.

But I was a disturbing element, a perplexing unknown quantity, which
had somehow crept into the work, and which seriously threatened to
impair the accuracy of his calculations. It was a touching sight to
behold the venerable mathematician as he pleaded with me not so
utterly to disregard precedent in the use of cotangents; or as he
urged, with eyes almost tearful, that ordinates were dangerous things
to trifle with. All in vain. More theorems went on to my cuff than
into my head. Never did chalk do so much work to so little purpose.
And, therefore, it came that Furnace Second was reduced to zero in
Professor Surd's estimation. He looked upon me with all the horror
which an unalgebraic nature could inspire. I have seen the professor
walk around an entire square rather than meet the man who had no
mathematics in his soul.

For Furnace Second were no invitations to Professor Surd's house.
Seventy of the class supped in delegations around the periphery of the
professor's tea-table. The seventy-first knew nothing of the charms of
that perfect ellipse, with its twin bunches of fuchsias and geraniums
in gorgeous precision at the two foci.

This, unfortunately enough, was no trifling deprivation. Not that I
longed especially for segments of Mrs. Surd's justly celebrated lemon
pies; not that the spheroidal damsons of her excellent preserving had
any marked allurements; not even that I yearned to hear the
professor's jocose tabletalk about binomials, and chatty illustrations
of abstruse paradoxes. The explanation is far different. Professor
Surd had a daughter. Twenty years before, he made a proposition of
marriage to the present Mrs. S. He added a little corollary to his
proposition not long after. The corollary was a girl.

Abscissa Surd was as perfectly symmetrical as Giotto's circle, and as
pure, withal, as the mathematics her father taught. It was just when
spring was coming to extract the roots of frozen-up vegetation that I
fell in love with the corollary. That she herself was not indifferent
I soon had reason to regard as a self-evident truth.