Petit chosier

Après avoir parcouru les contrées hostiles de l'arithmétique et passé les détroits polynomiaux...

We turned aside, not indeed to the uplands of the Delectable Mountains, but into a strange corridor of things like anagrams and acrostics called Sines, Cosines and Tangents. Apparently they were very important, especially when multiplied by each other, or by themselves! They had also this merit—you could learn many of their evolutions off by heart. There was a question in my third and last Examination about these Cosines and Tangents in a highly square-rooted condition which must have been decisive upon the whole of my after life. (...)

I have never met any of these creatures since.

My Early Life, Winston Chirchill