"Hey, Artie."
"Yeah, Jim?"
"You're good at math, right?"
Artie set aside the book he'd been reading — a slim volume of his favorite play, Hamlet — and glanced over at the desk where his partner was frowning at a sheet of paper, pencil in hand. "Math? Sure, I love math! What's the problem?"
"Well," Jim sighed, "I've got to figure out what x is if x squared equals four times b squared, but I suspect I'm not doing it right. It doesn't make sense."
"Oh, it's not that hard, Jim! You've just got to take the square root of both sides of the equation."
"Ok, that's what I thought. But it still doesn't look right."
"Oh? What did you get, x equals two b?"
"Yeah…" said Jim slowly.
"Ah, well," Artie continued, slipping into tutorial mode, "with square roots you've got to remember that the root could be positive or negative. For example, four could be either positive two multiplied by itself or negative two multiplied by itself. Does that help?"
"Oh! So you're saying the solution is…"
"…x equals plus or minus two b, right."
"Or to put it another way," said Jim, looking over at Artie with a gleam in his eye, "it's two b, or not two b!"
Artie's jaw dropped.
With a grin, Jim purred, "That is the answer!"
And while Jim's grin morphed into an outright smirk, Artie did the only thing he could do: he groaned heartily and dropped his face into his palm.
FIN