Editing Warhammer High (section)

==Math Class with Petra==
Petra was feeling something, although she wasn’t quite sure what. It was one of those emotions that you had to examine and unpack bit by bit to really understand.

Today was the first day of the new university-level math class that school had set up for those students who, like her, wouldn’t have learned anything new from highschool-level mathematics. Petra had hoped that what she would be feeling happiness and genuine interest right about now.

Instead, Petra was feeling something between anger and disappointment. She loved math, and had been so looking forward to a math class that actually challenged her, not something as easy as this! GAH!

“Deep breaths,” Petra thought.

Ahriman was going on and on about Integrals of all things. Integrals! Petra scanned the rest of the class. Roberta and Miranda seemed focused. How were they not bored out of their minds too?

Petra started absent-mindedly doodling on her paper, hoping it would keep her sane. So many integrals! Petra started drawing integrals one after the other on her page

∫ ∫ ∫ ∫ ∫ ∫ ∫

They kinda looked like a spiral, one next to the other. Petra drew them closer.

∫∫∫∫∫∫∫∫∫∫

Now they kinda looked like rope, so Petra decided she’d roll with that and kept drawing lengths of rope. When that got boring, she started drawing knots in the ropes, each knot being more intricate and complicated than the previous. Knot theory is mathematics, right?

Knots were fun to draw, because they always ended up working. You just had to draw a squiggle, follow the line, and alternate between going over or under at each intersection. It also worked with more than one squiggle, or a squiggle that split at a point.

Petra drew knots out of other things besides rope, like flowers, or ribbon. She even drew two 3-headed hydras, coiling around each-other; she’d give the drawing to The Twins when she saw them next. They’d probably like that.

Oh wow, were they still taking about integrals? Well there go all the chances of this class being interesting.

Petra went back to drawing knots, before actually taking the shoelace out of her left shoe and actually started tying some of the knots with it. She wondered what the physics of the knots were; how they pushed on themselves and held together, and what part of the knot was the weakest and the most structurally important. Physics was really more Remilia’s thing, but Petra wasn’t inept at it.

So, the drawing of knots transitioned smoothly into calculating tension in the string and forces exerted by each loop of the knot. That’s weird, her shoelace-knots tended to take a different shape than what the equations said. She probably had to account for the shoelace not being an ideal string. The shoelace was itself just a really long knot made of 16 smaller segments, which gave it a natural tendency to resist being twisted. Once that was accounted for and the equations updated, Petra was pleased to see that the math and the shoelace gave the same answer.

From there, the rest was easy. She multiplied the tension of each curve of the knot by the number of curves it supported and a value based on whether it was exposed or buried deep in the knot. Testing with the shoelace was incredibly successful; she could now deduce which curve was the weakest link, and could cut those ones easily with her penknife.

“Yes! It works,” Petra exclaimed in her mind. “I wonder if this is how dad felt whenever he broke a siege.” Petra felt content, and that feeling stuck with her for a whole 12 seconds, before class ended and she realized that she’d cut her shoelace into tiny little pieces and was now down one foot.

“Hey Petra. What are those?” asked Roberta as she passed by Petra’s desk, gesturing to the equations that covered a full two pages of her notebook and a good portion of the desk.

Petra grinned. “Oh those? They’re just some math-class doodles.”