Jamie was a math geek, & everyone knew it.
But he dressed like everyone else, he wasn’t a show-off know-it-all, and he spoke in coherent sentences. So people liked him.
Even though he was a math genius, he was also superstitious.
Everyone had just been handed out a quiz. Jamie, as always, flipped to the back to see how many questions there were. 13. Adjusting his glasses nervously, he turned back to the beginning, forgetting all about the ominous digit.
After 15 minutes of furious scribbling, he reached the last question. It was a devilishly long equation, but this didn’t set Jamie off. He preferred long equations over short ones, quite frankly. He rattled it off, then got a good look at his answer: 25.8069758….
He typed something frantically into his calculator, gasped, & bolted from the room. The class stared after him.
“What’s eaten him?” someone asked.
The teacher picked up Jamie’s quiz, & wrote his answer and something scrawled underneath on the board.
“This. It’s the square root of all evil.”