Mathematics 1512
Calculus II
Fall, 2000
Every year, the English Department at
San Jose State University
sponsors the
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
fiction contest,
for the opening sentence to the worst novel ever written, as
imagined by the contestants.
The contest is named for the author of
the novel Paul Clifford,
which began
It was a dark and stormy night and the rain
fell in torrents--except at occasional
intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of
wind which swept up the streets
(for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling
along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the
scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
Actually, in his day Bullwer-Lytton
(
portrait)
was a popular novelist and poet in the Byronic tradition
(some poetry
or
some prose -
judge for yourself.)
I particularly admired the purple mathematical prose of
Dale Dellutri in his 1999 entry,
A Tale of Two Statisticians, which supposedly begins
It wasn't the best of times; it wasn't the worst of times;
it was the times you'd
get if you arranged all possible times (including even fictional times in
which the nights were usually dark and stormy) in order from worst to
best on the real number line from 0.0 inclusive to 1.0 inclusive and
then used a really good
random uniform number generator
to pick a
value in that range thus choosing the corresponding times - that's the
times it was.
Link to:
The 1512 home page
Evans Harrell's home page
The School of Math
on-line resources
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