What's Twice Eleven?

		   with apologies to A. A. Milne


"Bother!" said Pooh. "Christopher Robin needs a vanishing theorem. But I
can't prove one without knowing the Dolbeault cohomology," he said. He
thought for a moment. "Or the Cech cohomology," he continued, "except I
don't have a Leray cover, " he added sadly. "So I must use the Dolbeault 
complex. But to compute its cohomology I need to know where the Leray-
Serre spectral sequence degenerates," he went on. "For vector bundles,"
he added. "And I can't figure out where the spectral sequence degenerates
because I've forgotten what's twice eleven. Bother!"

Weeks later he was still troubling over it when there came a knock at his
front door. "It's Christopher Robin!" shouted Pooh happily when he opened
the door and saw his friend.

"Oh, Bear!" laughed Christopher Robin when he saw the reams of paper strewn
about Pooh's living room. He laughed, and he laughed, and he laughed until
tears ran down his cheeks. "Silly old Bear," he said when he'd collected
himself. "The base space is a Stein manifold!"

"So it is, so it is," murmured Bear to himself. "I have been very foolish and
am a bear of no brain at all."

"Anyhow," he said, brightening, "we know what ONE times eleven is. Time for
a little something!" he said as he got down the honey and condensed milk
from his cupboard.



			     From "Now We Are Sixth-Year Graduate Students"


C. 1995, Andrew D. Hwang