Once upon a time the Egyptians lived in bedroom communities known as mud holes. The problem with these bedroom mud holes is that they not only lacked access to decent museums featuring mummies, but the Egyptian’s backyards disappeared into the Nile River—once, twice, sometimes seventy-two times a month at high tide.
This caused a lot of confusion when the mud overlapped. No one knew where the chain link fence guys should put in the new fences or who belonged to which papyrus patch. It was a mud hole mess—all the time.
So the Egyptians invented algebra, which helped them keep their mind off of the mess in their back yards.
Until one day a guy named Jut, realized that he could get back at his neighbors, whom he suspected of fudging the chain link fence lines, by insisting that the local school board force his neighbor’s children to learn algebra which kept them at home in their hovels and out of Jut’s mud. Jut was a real joker.
Algebra became a national craze, right up there with “Dancing With the Pharaoh’s Architect.”
Then Muslims conquered everyone with their swords and their peaceful interest in spreading the use of the zero. Not wanting to be the only ones made miserable by mathematics, the Muslims continued conquering—well, everyone, proving that math makes people overly enthusiastic, perhaps even manic-depressive.
Proof, also, that the Arab nations are to blame for the widespread heartbreak caused by algorithms, the word “algebra” is, in fact, an Arabic word meaning “A Poo-Poo Platter of Numbers for Occidental Suckers.” In the 19th century British mathematicians took up the math gauntlet, which is why “the colonies” kicked their junk in 1776.
“Taxation without representation” was a popular catchphrase in the colonies that would later come to mean that the new, shiny government would require all college students to take College Algebra rather than taking Accounting, so that no one would know how much taxation without representation they (the government) would actually be doing in the future, because it was going to be a lot.
That’s how I made a “D” on my first quiz in College Algebra. I hate Jut.
It is my opinion that cultures that invent things like the zero are silly people bent on cornering the market of world oil supplies, under the code name of silly looking letters like OPEC (note: the use of the silly zero shaped letter at the beginning of the still sillier sounding code word.) I rest my case.
Linda (Keeper of the History) Zern
