this is kind of politics right?
"An economics professor says his flight was delayed because a fellow passenger thought the equations he was writing might be a sign he was a terrorist."
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/07/professor-flight-delay-terrorism-equation-american-airlinesand here's something
not in the article
"A potential terrorist plot was thankfully averted yesterday in America, when a very obtuse lady - clearly taking her cue from Führer Trump - observed in an American Airlines flight a gentlemen of lesser than acceptable white complexion, writing out strange symbols and complex numbers next to her. Worried that he might be a terrorist, she passed a secret note to a flight attendant and ingeniously made an excuse to alert the authorities.
Thankfully, the authorities quickly intervened and and determined that the said gentleman, while not carrying weapons of maths instruction, was in fact a member of a terrifying gang: the al-Gebra Movement. The al-Gebra group was founded by the Arab mathematician al-Khawarizmi, who wrote a book entitled Ilm al-Jabr, from which the group derived its name. This gentleman, upon further investigation, was revealed to be a full-fledged, senior ranking member of the cult, and had been conferred the title 'Professor' - the highest ranking title in the movement. He was charged with actively recruiting students to employ al-Gebra's techniques in their daily lives, and pleaded guilty to the more serious charge of advocating members to sign up to al-Gebra training.
Al-Gebra is a fearsome cult, and many high-schoolers who are exposed to it are immediately terrified at the cruelty of the techniques it employs. Members of the cult seek to find average solutions to complex equations; they create differences and derive functions at will, terrifying innocent bystanders. Many a young lady (and even men) have been known to wake up in the middle of the night, sweating and screaming with fear, the night before facing al-Gebra's tests.
It is well-known that they refer to themselves with obscure terms such as 'x' and 'y', hiding behind standard deviations and making their points, drawing their lines, and dissecting complex square roots with imaginary numbers.
People who follow such extreme views typically believe they can have have their pi and eat it too.
Although the authorities were not quite sure of the angle of this 'professor', and could not calculate the unknown variable found in his collection of radii-active materials, they were at least able to multiply their theorems and demonstrate that they were diagonally opposed to prime concepts such as common sense.
The Attorney General remarked, "If I've said it n times, I've said it n+1 times: the al-Gebra movement thinks itself acute, but in reality it has an infinite number of problems, and we shall continue to sin and co-sin away at them until we get to the root of their solution. You can count on me!"
To which the Al-Jazeera Reporter asked, "Which numeral system does your agency employ in counting out against radical al-Gebra?"
"Well, obviously, Arabic numerals of course. What else works?!" he replied."
