Mathematics 2401             Calculus III            


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 was a popular novelist and poet in the Byronic tradition.

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.
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