Before I begin I would like to say that I personally know many mathematicians. Several of my friends and two family members all have advanced degrees in math. As people they are all (of course) different, but I love them all anyway, because they are my friends and family and because they just happen to be great people. I have the utmost respect for people who choose a field that deals in the pure and theoretical forms of human advancement, and doubly that for people who are teachers. (Teachers deserve a
lot of respect). I have nothing against the field of mathematics or the people who work in it.
Having said that...
First: Doug, I specifically said that the heart was continuous
in its defined area. Please read carefully before getting pedantic.
Second: one trait that I have noticed among mathematicians is the straightforward literal-mindness. That is not a bad thing. It's a human trait, lots of people are like that, and in the field of mathematics it's very useful. But it also lends itself to missing the joke, taking some things
too literally or just overall not getting the point.
The truth of the matter is this (as I see it): there are many quotes that begin "my heart is...":
- My heart is wax to be moulded as she pleases, but enduring as marble to retain. - Miguel de Cervantes, The Little Gypsy.
- My heart is like a singing bird - Christina G. Rossetti, A Birthday.
- My heart, the bird of the wilderness, has found its sky in your eyes. - Rabindranath Tagore, Gardener, 31.
- My Heart Is a Holy Place - Patricia Van Ness
- My heart is a ladle of sweet water brimming over. - Anita Diamant, The Red Tent
- My heart is a void, dead, and this makes me sad. - Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs
- My heart is a gypsy - continuously searching for a home, - Jenna Jameson
And so on and so forth.
The author simply took something that people would recognize and understand and that sounded good.
"My heart is an exponential function on the xy plane" or "My heart when plotted has a tangent that is greater than zero therefore my heart is a concave up parabola and things are getting better" just don't have the same ring to it, you know what I mean?
And finally: let P be the group of people that are alive at this time. Let T be the group of all the time that exists in the universe. Let pl(p,t) be any function that pleases person p (p is in P) at time t (t is in T).
For all p in P there exists some t in T such that pl(p,t).
There exists some p in P such that pl(p,t) for all t in T.
But there is no pl() such that pl(p,t) for all p in P and for all t in T.
"You can please all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot please all the people all the time."