# The homeland of the shepherd?

$$\displaystyle \left \lfloor \frac{Gen4:1-16} {a_5x^5+a_4x^4+a_3x^3+a_2x^2+a_1x+a_0} \right \rfloor$$ + «my father was the first one»

= A country

Apparently the country intended is

OMAN.

The numerator is clearly

a reference to the first 16 verses of chapter 4 of the Biblical book of Genesis. This tells the story of Cain and Abel. In view of the title it may be worth a reminder that Abel was a shepherd.

It happens that

Abel is also the name of a mathematician, who proved that a general quintic polynomial (like the one in the denominator) can't have its roots found by the same sort of process as we learn in school for quadratic equations. (Cubics and quartics can, though the process is more complicated.) His name is also applied to operations that are commutative; an earlier version of the question had the terms of the polynomial in a different order, and what makes it the same polynomial is exactly the fact that numbers, under addition, form an Abelian group.

So I'd thought the "fraction"

was taking "Cain and Abel" and either dividing out by "Abel" or emphasizing that we want Abel rather than Cain.

However,

in comments OP has explained that the actual intention was (1) to interpret the polynomial in the denominator as 0 (because when you write down a polynomial, sometimes the next thing you do is equate it to zero to find its roots) and then (2) to interpret the resulting fraction, with 0 in the denominator, as itself 0 (I don't really understand why, though I guess you can define the result of dividing by zero to be whatever you like :-)).

Now, what else do we have?

"My father was the first one". If "my" means Abel's, or indeed Cain's, the father in question is Adam, most notably the first man but also the first person, the first human, the first husband, the first father, etc.

So now

we combine 0 from the fraction and MAN from the second term to get the country OMAN.

• You have figured it out. The equation however equals 0, and a fraction dividing on 0 is...? Jun 13 at 5:13
• ... one of "undefined", "infinity", "not a number" or various abbreviations for such things. None of which, I'm afraid, helps me and further. Infman? Nandad? Undefinedhuman? (I don't quite understand why I'm supposed to interpret an arbitrary quintic as "0" either, but no matter.) Jun 14 at 0:34
• The classic way of writing a polynomial like this, has "= 0" as the other side of the equation. Otherwise you wouldn't need a<sub>0</sub>. Jun 14 at 1:26
• 0+man=Oman. Edit and I can tick off for the correct answer Jun 14 at 4:28
• Butbutbut a fraction with zero in the denominator isn't zero. And the fact that you often ask when a polynomial is zero doesn't mean that whenever you see a polynomial you should replace it with a zero. Ah well, never mind. I'll make appropriate edits to my answer without much guilt, since I did in fact get all the pieces :-). Jun 14 at 11:24