[There are lights, or something. One figure is talking to itself.]

For my tenth birthday, all I wanted was a puppy. I wanted it more than anything in the world. I begged and begged my parents for months. Instead, my father got me a differential n-form.

'What is it?'

'Why, it's an alternating multilinear map in n vector variables of a vector space V over a field F into F. They make swell pets. You can call him Chester.'

'Does it fetch?'

'No.'

'Does it play dead?'

'Nope.'

'Does it like to chase squirrels?'

'Even better. In a neighborhood U of any point P of a k-dimensional differentiable manifold M, it can be expressed as a real differentiable function f-sub-U on the manifold times the wedge product of n distinct elements of the cotangent bundle to M.'

'Mommy? Make Daddy stop.'

'And you can integrate it over the manifold according to Stokes' Theorem using the exterior derivative!'

'I want a puppy!'

'You ungrateful little shit, I'll teach you to appreciate what you're given...'

Then he raped me and beat me, and left me alone to cry and bleed with only my differential n-form for company. That's why I'm a prostitute now.

So, you wanna fuck or what?

[Lights out.]

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©2001 Luke Gutzwiller. I really mean it. Violation may result in the unwanted collapse of your state vector. I hated differential geometry.