X-ed!

The evil of every equation, the genesis of utter confusion…. Numerous neurons of mine collapse, the moment I encounter Mr. X!

A myth, a miracle, an oracle or someone cynical! No, no! He’s just Mr. X- the one who rules both the worlds, be it a real or a complex and the one who binds together the whole lot of insane integers, furious fractions, raucous rationals, irritating irrationals and slumberly surds! Surviving many a operations under the dreaded differentiators and intense integrators, Mr. X has emerged unharmed and unfazed over the decades, in fact over the centuries!

Not an alien to the students of this era of mind, misery and mathematics, the so called variable X, after engulfing the entire algebraic arena, before extending its devouring kills to the physical, chemical and biological realms up to an astonishing stature, has left the Earth guessing. What could be the next prey of this predator, signifying death to an intellectual and deletion to a geek? Not the literature please!

Grammatically speaking, I fail to understand, if this mathematical wonder falls into the category of a noun, a pronoun, a verb or an adjective, for starting from the age of Suresh, going through the profits and deficits of a company and ending at the grand totals and percentages of the students of a hypothetical institute; every think-able thing, feel-able feeling and ponder-able prose could be tagged with this single alphabet! It’s a one-man army in itself.

Moreover, it looks so weird to call X, a dependant, even though the equation solely depends on it. And if you’re not down with that, meet the proud progeny of Mr. X, the coveted X_i’s  (i=1,2,3,….,n :p), amplifying the already endless empire of their progenitor.

An interesting incident often encountered is the effervescence of a different Mr. X each time, the case of getting entirely different solutions, while solving the same problem again or a mismatch in the results of two students tackling the same problem. Certainly, Mr. X changes his skins just too fast as a fiddle!

With my malicious memories of unwanted and unconscious errors I committed while analyzing Mr. X notwithstanding, I could no longer epitomize this baffling battalion. But, I am sure that you could now at least get a glimpse of this creature causing carnage!