On a warm summer's night you could hear softly melting chords in one of the right angles of a right triangle. In the triangle, Miss Tangens, under the care of her Auntie Kontangen, dwelt, and just then Don Sinus serenaded on an ellipse, over which four parallels were stretched. He enthusiastically leaned against the radius c of the circle and sang something like this:
"The content of the circle is r square pi
O tangent! I love you, oh dear, how!
The content of the triangle ah through 2,
O sweetest tangent, I remain faithful to you! "
A faint noise went through the air and a brass thumbtack threw its mild light over the scene. - The sine had finished his song. Miss Tangens sat at an angle on a transversal at the window, opened it now, seized by the touching folk-song, and threw down the knight a beautiful square-root, which delighted Don Sinus with his nose and his bosom. Then he put his hand over his heart and walked away with noble decency, the center of the circle described.
But no sooner had he gone a few paces than his rival Cosinus exploded behind a dark log-bush, a sharply cut fraction in his hand. Sinus, in turn, wanted to pull away from the leather, but saw himself without weapons and defended himself desperately with a mantissa, which he tore from the logarithm bush; but soon he succumbed to the better-armed cosine, which, in anger, cut him to nothing but proportional particles. Then he whistled through his fingers, whereon from all angles hired secants came forth who set fire to the right-angled triangle and then impaled the old cotangent on a bundle of rays and then killed it with a square clamp. The whining tangents, however, snatched Cosinus from the flames, placed them in a regular hexagon covered with two radicans, and drove off with the swiftness of a geometric procession. He did not rest until he reached the fourth quadrant; Only then did he see his folly, for it is well known that the tangent in the fourth quadrant immediately becomes negative. She was able to move away unseen, wandering back to the ruins of her right-angled triangle, and when she found the maimed corpse of the sinus there, she silently plunged down from the periphery of the inscribed circle.
So Sinus and Tangens were united in death. The next day she was placed in a prismatic room and buried under muted music in a physical corner. A regular tetrahedron still refers to her grave today.
Contribution of 16-year-old Erich Schairer to the Christmas-Kneipp newspaper 1903 of the Blaubeurener seminarians.