Christmaths carols II

Behind today’s door… Another carol!

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This post was part of the Chalkdust 2016 Advent Calendar.

Welcome to the 20th day of the 2016 Chalkdust Advent Calendar. Today we have yet another Christmaths Carol!

The Cubic and Quadratic (to the tune of The Holly and the Ivy)

The cubic and quadratic
Though they are both well known
Of all the functions that are in the book
Quadratic bears the crown.
Oh, the formula quadratic
And the solving for real roots
Whether there are two, one, or none (at all)
The discriminant will tell.
The cubic bears an index
Of three, its highest power
Quadratic bore exponent two
To be its sweet flavour.
The cubic bears a wiggle
As local max and min
Quadratic bore the zeros of
The first derivative.

The carol in this post was written by Elizabeth A. Williams and is distributed under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA license. This means that you are free to share it around as long as you include this note. Happy carolling!

Elizabeth is a freelance mathematician accompanied by Zeke, a free-range rat.

TD is an undergraduate at UCL who actually understands the 1967 James Bond spoof Casino Royale, starring David Niven, Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, and Orson Welles as Le Chiffre.

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