| Numbers didn't used to be a problem. Back in the caveman days all we had was one through ten. That's how many fingers they had, so that's as high as they could count. Besides, how many cavemen needed to count anything higher than ten. Not many. The downfall of Western Civilization (otherwise known as the invention of mathematics) occured when one neanderthal needed to count eleven items. He sat around for weeks trying to figure out what the heck to do. He was just about to throw one out when he made a discovery: he had toes as well. Ten of them to be precise. The caveman began using both his fingers and his toes to count. The amount of numbers in the world had doubled. For centuries, people were content. Then, one day, someone decided that twenty was not the highest number in the world. He astounded his scientific peers (which consisted of a group of men trying to make fire by hitting the ground with a stick while yelling OOOGA WOOGA AH AH OOOOOOO!) by gathering together twenty rocks. Then he found another one and added it to the pile. Now there were twenty-one. One of the cavemen watching stood up and added another one. One by one, rocks were added to the pile until they had too many to count on all of their fingers and toes combined. Slowly, it was eventually deduced that numbers just kept climbing up and up and never got anywhere. This is where numbers started to get annoying. There's an infinite number of them! Just when you've counted to the highest number you've ever counted before, you still aren't anywhere near the end. In fact there is no end! None at all! But for the most part, numbers were only a minor irritation. It wasn't until organized mathematicians appeared that math became something to fear. Then we were given the plus symbol. All of a sudden people were forced to take two numbers and put them together to get ONE NUMBER?! You started with two and put them side by side and somehow they fused together into a single one. And that new number was a different one from the other two. Not only that, but now zero was considered a number. Zero was never a problem. Why? Because it wasn't there! It didn't exist! It was a big load of jack squat! But now zero can't be ignored. Math teachers insist that is does exist. It is there. How can it be there if it's nothing!? Well, people at this time were just getting over the shock when someone managed to slice a number in two. Instead of two parts of one number, two NEW numbers emerged. Somehow we could now get two numbers from one. People panicked. But it wasn't over. Multiplication and division emerged. Scientists were shocked when they placed a pair of threes together and got a nine. People tried as hard as they could, but they could never seem to get the two threes to do anything more than turn into a six. Where the hell did the nine come from? But that wasn't enough. Someone made one of the threes a four and got twelve. Then someone managed to split a 27 into a three and a nine. Division soon led to the concept of long division (which has been the single most stressful concept in elementary education ever since). Then nothing happened for awhile. People began to get the hang of basic math. But one scientist (whose name I do not know, if he even exists) asked: What would happen if I subtracted a three from a two? He was laughed at. Any moron could subtract a two from a three, but who on earth would want to take three out of a two. The scientist didn't let discouragement by his peers stop him (unfortunately). He proceeded with his expierements and got something that surprised everybody: a negative one. Now there were not only an infinite amout of numbers from zero up, but there were an infinite amount of numbers on the other side. Zero was no longer a comfortable resting point people could lean on. Numbers existed in an infinite limbo. Then another thing that had been thought impossible was done. The number one was split. The result was one half which was split further and further. Numbers couldn't stop being split. They just got smaller and smaller and smaller. An infinite amount of numbers was acceptable, but the fact that an infinite stretch of numbers could exist just between zero and one was insane! INSANE! Decimels and their more annoying cousin fractions came into play. Soon more discoveries were made. There were exponents and square roots which just made people downright sick. Square roots were easy enough to deal with until someone decided to take the square root of a negative one. What did he get? And imaginary number. IMAGINARY! IF IT'S IMAGINARY THEN THAT MEANS IT DOESN'T EXIST RIGHT!? In fact an imaginary number exists even less than zero does ( I know that sounds weird but it's true). If it doesn't exist, then why do we need to use it?! It isn't here. It isn't there. It isn't anywhere. Do you know where it is? Cause' I sure don't! Yeah, that's what I thought. You can't find in anywhere. So what did this guy call his imaginary number. Not the square root of negative one. He called it "i". People went WHOAH... hold up a minute. i? i is a letter, not a number. But before they could object too much, X became a number. Which number? ALL OF THEM!!! X IS EVERY FREAKIN' NUMBER YOU CAN THINK OF! THIS IS NOT ENGLISH CLASS! WE DO NOT USE LETTERS IN MATH! MATH IS RESERVED FOR NUMBERS! But did anybody listen. Oh, no. Soon Y, Z, A, B, C, and M were added. Before too long, all twenty-six letters of the alphabet were being used (well, except for "o". It looked too much like zero). We have all our letters equal to every number. Every letter represents an infinite number of numbers. About this time, people were becomming very scared. Many went insane. Then, just when everyone thought it couldn't get any worse. The word problem was invented. Math was being given a practical use. Word problems forced people to see that math is all around them. Math was everywhere. People saw math wherever they went. No one traveled alone for fear that the numbers in their environments would swoop down and consume them. No one was safe from numbers. Not even in their own homes. Math wasn't just terrorizing school classrooms anymore. But then, just when things were looking their darkest, a savior arrived. The calculator! Some poor soul dedicated his life to programing all the annoying math equations into a machine so people wouldn't have to do it themselves. He truley was the greatest person to ever walk the earth. People could simply push in a sequence of numbers only to have their calculators malfunction. Yes, even the calculators couldn't do the math. They simply melted. But people could blame their bad test scores on the piece of melted ooze. I someone couldn't do a problem they simply shrugged and said, "my calculator stopped working". Everyone accepted this excuse because they couldn't do the math either. Eventually more high tech calculators were invented that malfunctioned at a more advanced level. Calculators balanced out most of the terror that math brought on, but no one ever got over the horrors of numbers. They still haunt us, and tick off students everywhere. Will we ever be safe from math? The answer is no. At least not as long as algebra, triginometry, and calculus are still taught in schools. And that...that is why I hate numbers. |