Math Sad Stories

Math tells us three of the saddest stories…TANGENT: lines who had one chance to meet and then parted foreverPARALLEL: lines who were never meant to meet
and
ASYMPTOTES: lines who can get closer and closer but will never be together.

This quote made me feel sad when I tried to relate it to people. It made me think which situation is the saddest.

For parallel lines, you don’t know what you lost since you never ever met. But since you never had the chance to meet, you never had the chance to experience the lovely things you might have experienced.

I think it’s sad for tangents because you know what you lost and you can never have it back. Do you know that no matter how far you extend tangents they would never meet again? Sigh.

But I guess it’s worse for asymptotes because the graphed curve and the line can get really, really close, but that’s just it. You can stretch an asymptote to infinity and the distance between them becomes smaller than any distance that one may specify, but it will never be zero.

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Repost from: December 23, 2008 Multiply entry and Blogspot entry “Math Sad Stories”