In the ballroom of the Hotel Taftoftia, during Christmas week, William
K. Spriggs, Ph.D., held a number of fashionable audiences spellbound
with his marvellously lucid dances in Euclid and Algebra up to
Quadratics. Perhaps the very acme of the Terpsichorean art was attained
in the masterly fluency of body and limbs with which Mr. Spriggs
demonstrated that the sum of the angles in any triangle is equal
to two right angles. In Pittsburg Mr. Spriggs is said to have moved
an audience to tears when, by an original combination of the Virginia
reel, the two-step, and the Navajo snake dance, he showed that if
_x^{2}+y^{2}_ = 25 and _x^{2}-y^{2}_ = 25, _x_ equals 5 and _y_ equals
zero. All the pride and selfishness of _x_, all the despair of _y_, were
mirrored in the dancer's play of features. The spectators could not help
pondering over the seeming law of injustice that rules the world. Why
should _x_ be everything in the equations and _y_ nothing? Why should
_y_'s nonentity be used even to set off the all importance of _x_? But
they found no answer. On the other hand, a large number of college
freshmen who had failed on their entrance mathematics found no
difficulty in passing off their conditions after attending three
performances of Mr.
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