The hard math

Last October, in a first-year class, we read a poem. I told the story of reading an earlier poem, about 30 years earlier, which had included the word volcano. This was in the tropics. That weekend, a volcano broke through the Rabaul peninsula. Another poem had said earthquake, which happened too. Now, I told a student last October, you've gone and mentioned the hardest math ever, a.k.a. calculus, and April will act like winter. See? Although sworn to champion all lines of enquiry, we'll say no more of hard stuff. (That student, who went into Actuarial Science, a.k.a. performance-enhanced accounting, was last seen walking the snowy alley south of Vic.)