| Great Math Jokes! |
| Mathematician Jokes -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Did you know that there are three types of mathematicians? Those who can count and those who can't. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Proofs that all odd numbers greater than 1 are prime according to Mathematician: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime and the rest follow by induction Physicist: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 expected experimental error, 11 is prime, ... Engineer: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is prime, ... -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A Cherokee indian chief had three wives, each of whom was pregnant. The first squaw gave birth to a boy, and the chief was so elated he built her a teepee made of buffalo hide. A few days later, the second squaw gave birth, and also had a boy. The chief was extremely happy; he built her a teepee made of antelope hide. The third squaw gave birth a few days later, but the chief kept the birth details a secret. He built the woman a teepee out of hippopotamus hide, and challenged the people in the tribe to guess the most recent birth details, the correct guesser receiving a fine prize. Several of his people tried, but were unsuccessful in their guesses. Finally, a young brave came forth and declared that the third wife had delivered twin boys. "Correct"!, cried the chief. "How did you know"? "It's simple", replied the warrior. "The value of the squaw of the hippopotamus is equal to the sons of the squaws of the other two hides." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A guy decided to go to the brain transplant clinic to refreshen his supply of brains. The secretary informed him that they had three kinds of brains available at that time. Doctors' brains were going for $20 per ounce and lawyers' brains were getting $30 per ounce. And then there were mathematicians' brains which were currently fetching $1000 per ounce. "A 1000 dollars an ounce!" he cried. "Why are they so expensive?" "It takes more mathematicians to get an ounce of brains," she explained. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A topologist walks into a bar and orders a drink. The bartender, being a number theorist, says, "I'm sorry, but we don't serve topologists here." The disgruntled topologist walks outside, but then gets an idea and performs Dahn surgery upon herself. She walks into the bar, and the bartender, who does not recognize her since she is now a different manifold, serves her a drink. However, the bartender thinks she looks familiar, or at least locally similar, and asks, "Aren't you that topologist that just came in here?" To which she responds, "No, I'm a frayed knot." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A team of engineers were required to measure the height of a flag pole. They only had a measuring tape, and were getting quite frustrated trying to keep the tape along the pole. It kept falling down, etc. A mathematician comes along, finds out their problem, and proceeds to remove the pole from the ground and measure it easily. When he leaves, one engineer says to the other: "Just like a mathematician! We need to know the height, and he gives us the length!" -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- There was once a very smart horse. Anything that was shown it, it mastered easily, until one day, its teachers tried to teach it about rectangular coordinates and it couldn't understand them. All the horse's acquaintances and friends tried to figure out what was the matter and couldn't. Then a new guy (what the heck, a computer engineer) looked at the problem and said, "Of course he can't do it. Why, you're putting Descartes before the horse!" -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A constant function and e^x are walking on Broadway. Then suddenly the constant function sees a differential operator approaching and runs away. so e to-the x follows him and asks why the hurry. "Well, you see, there's this diff.operator coming this way, and when we meet, he'll differentiate me and nothing will be left of me...!" "Ah," says e^x, "he won't bother ME, I'm e to-the x!" and he walks on. Of course he meets the differential operator after a short distance. e^x : "Hi, I'm e^x" diff.op. : "Hi, I'm d/dy" -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "The reason that every major university maintains a department of mathematics is that it is cheaper to do this than to institutionalize all those people." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- First of all let me make it clear that I have nothing against contravariant functors. Some of my best friends are cohomology theories! But now you aren't supposed to call them contravariant anymore. It's Algebraically Correct to call them 'differently arrowed'!! In the same way that transcendental numbers are polynomially challenged? Manifolds are personifolds (humanifolds). Neighborhoods are neighbor victims of society. It's the Asian Remainder Theorem. It isn't PC to use "singularity" - the function is "convergently challenged" there. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mathematical Sex Wherein it is related how that Polygon of Womanly Virtue, your Polly Nomial (our heroine) is accosted by that Notorious Villain Curly Pi, and factored (oh, horror). Once upon a time ( 1/T ), Pretty Polly Nomial was strolling across a field of vectors when she came to the boundary of a singularly large matrix. Now Polly was convergent and her mother had made it an absolute condition that she never enter such an array without her brackets on. Polly, however, who had changed her variables that morning and was feeling particularly badly behaved, ignored this condition on the basis that it was insufficient, and made her way amongst the complex elements. Rows and columns closed in from all sides. Tangents approached her surface. She became tensor and tensor. Quite suddenly, two branches of a hyperbola touched her at a single point. She oscillated violently, lost all sense of directrix, and went completely divergent. As she reached a turning point, she tripped over a square root that was protruding from the erf and plunged headlong down a steep gradient. When she rounded off once more, she found herself inverted, apparently alone, in a non-Euclidian space. She was being watched, however. That smooth operator, Curly Pi, was lurking innerproduct. As his eyes devoured her curvilinear coordinates, a singular expression crossed his face. He wondered, was she still convergent? He decided to integrate improperly at once. Hearing a common fraction behind her, Polly rotated and saw Curly Pi approaching with his power series extrapolated. She could see at once by his degenerate conic and dissipative terms that he was bent on no good. "Arcsinh," she gasped. "Ho, ho," he said. "What a symmetric little asymptote you have. I can see your angles have a lot of secs." "Oh, sir," she protested, "keep away from me. I haven't got my brackets on." "Calm yourself, My Dear," said our Suave Operator. "Your fears are purely imaginary." "I, I," she thought, "perhaps he's not normal but homologous." "What order are you?" the Brute demanded. "Seventeen," replied Polly. Curly leered. "I suppose you've never been operated on." "Of course not," Polly replied quite properly. "I'm absolutely convergent." "Come, come," said Curly, "Let's off to a decimal place I know and I'll take you to the limit." "Never," gasped Polly. "Abscissa," he swore, using the vilest oath he knew. His patience was gone. Coshing her over the coefficient with a log until she was powerless, Curly removed her discontinuities. He stared at her significant places, and began smoothing out her points of inflection. Poor Polly. The algorithmic method was now her only hope. She felt his hand tending to her asymptotic limit. Her convergence would soon be gone forever. There was no mercy, for Curly was a heavyside operator. Curly's radius squared itself; Polly's loci quivered. He integrated by parts. He integrated by partial fractions. After he cofactored, he performed rungecutta on her. The complex beast even went all the way around and did a contour integration. Curly went on operating until he had satisfied her hypothesis, then he exponentiated and became completely orthogonal. When Polly got home that night, her mother noticed that she was no longer piecewise continuous, but had been truncated in several places. But is was too late to differentiate now. As the months went by, Polly's denominator increased monotonically. Finally, she went to the L'Hopital and generated a small but pathological function which left surds all over the place and drove Polly to deviation. The moral of our sad story is this: 'If you want to keep your expressions convergent, never allow them a single degree of freedom...' -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- After the earth dries out, Noah tells all the animals to 'go forth and multiply'. However, two snakes, adders to be specific, complain to Noah that this is one thing they have never been able to do, hard as they have tried. Undaunted, Noah instructs the snakes to go into the woods, make tables from the trunks of fallen trees and give it a try on the tabletops. The snakes respond that they don't understand how this will help them to procreate whereupon Noah explains: "Well, even adders can multiply using log tables!" -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A man camped in a national park, and noticed Mr. Snake and Mrs. Snake slithering by. "Where are all the little snakes?" he asked. Mr. Snake replied, "We are adders, so we cannot multiply." The following year, the man returned to the same camping spot. This time there were a whole batch of little snakes. "I thought you said you could not multiply," he said to Mr. Snake. "Well, the park ranger came by and built a log table, so now we can multiply by adding!" -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q: What's purple and commutes? A: An abelian grape. Q: What's purple, commutes, and is worshiped by a limited number of people? A: A finitely venerated abelian grape. Q: Why did the mathematician name his dog "Cauchy"? A: Because he left a residue at every pole. Q: Why is it that the more accuracy you demand from an interpolation function, the more expensive it becomes to compute? A: That's the Law of Spline Demand. Q: What do a mathematician and a physicist [or engineer, or musician, or whatever the profession of the person addressed] have in common? A: They are both stupid, with the exception of the mathematician. Q: What do you call a teapot of boiling water on top of mount everest? A: A high-pot-in-use Q: What do you call a broken record? A: A Decca-gone Q: What do you get when you cross 50 female pigs and 50 male deer? A: One hundred sows-and-bucks. Q: Why did the chicken cross the Moebius strip? A: To get to the other ... er, um ... Q: What is the world's longest song? A: "Aleph-nought Bottles of Beer on the Wall." Q: What's yellow and equivalent to the Axiom of Choice. A: Zorn's Lemon. Q: What do you get if you cross an elephant with a zebra. A: Elephant zebra sin theta. Q: What do you get when you cross an elephant and a grape? A: Elephant-grape-sin(theta) Q: What do you get if you cross an elephant with a mountain climber. A: You can't do that. A mountain climber is a scalar. Q: What do you get when you cross an elephant with a banana? A: Elephant banana sine theta in a direction mutually perpendicular to the two as determined by the right hand rule. Q: What do you get when you cross a tsetse with a mountain climber? A: Nothing, you can't cross a vector with a scalar. Q: What do you get when you cross a mountain goat and a mountain climber? A: Nothing. You cant cross two scalars. Q: To what question is the answer "9W." A: "Dr. Wiener, do you spell your name with a V?" Q: What's non-orientable and lives in the sea? A: Mobius Dick. Q: What do you get when you put a spinning flywheel in a casket and turn a corner? A: A funeral precession. Q: What's big, grey, and proves the uncountability of the reals? A: Cantor's Diagonal Elephant! Q: What do you call a young eigensheep? A: A lamb, duh!!! Q: What goes "Pieces of seven! Pieces of seven!"? A: A parroty error!! Q: What did the circle say to the tangent line? A: "Stop touching me!" Q: What's yellow, linear, normed and complete? A: A Bananach space. Q: What's polite and works for the phone company? A: A deferential operator. Q: Mathematical Name for a Toilet Seat? A: An ass-toroid Q: Why didn't Newton discover group theory? A: Because he wasn't Abel. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Three men are in a hot-air balloon. Soon, they find themselves lost in a canyon somewhere. One of the three men says, "I've got an idea. We can call for help in this canyon and the echo will carry our voices far." So he leans over the basket and yells out, "Helllloooooo! Where are we?" (They hear the echo several times.) 15 minutes later, they hear this echoing voice: "Helllloooooo! You're lost!!" One of the men says, "That must have been a mathematician." Puzzled, one of the other men asks, "Why do you say that?" The reply: "For three reasons. (1) he took a long time to answer, (2) he was absolutely correct, and (3) his answer was absolutely useless." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A small, 14-seat plane is circling for a landing in Atlanta. It's totally fogged in, zero visibility, and suddenly there's a small electrical fire in the cockpit which disables all of the instruments and the radio. The pilot continues circling, totally lost, when suddenly he finds himself flying next to a tall office building. He rolls down the window (this particular airplane happens to have roll-down windows) and yells to a person inside the building, "Where are we?" The person responds "In an airplane!" The pilot then banks sharply to the right, circles twice, and makes a perfect landing at Atlanta International. As the passengers emerge, shaken but unhurt, one of them says to the pilot, "I'm certainly glad you were able to land safely, but I don't understand how the response you got was any use." "Simple," responded the pilot. "I got an answer that was completely accurate and totally irrelevant to my problem, so I knew it had to be the IBM building." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- OLD MATH TEACHERS never die, they just reduce to lowest terms OLD MATHEMATICIANS never die, they just disintegrate OLD MATHEMATICIANS never die, they just go off on a tangent OLD NUMERICAL ANALYSTS never die, they just get disarrayed OLD TRIGONOMETRY TEACHERS never die, they just lose their identities -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Two math professors are in a restaurant. One argues that the average person does not know any math beyond high school. The other argues that the average person knows some more advanced math. Just then, the first one gets up to use the rest room. The second professor calls over his waitress and says, "When you bring our food, I'm going to ask you a mathematical question. I want you to answer, 'One third x cubed.' Can you do that?" The waitress says, "I don't know if I can remember that. One thurr... um..." "One third x cubed," says the prof. "One thir dex cue?," asks the waitress. "One" "One" "Third" "Third" "X" "X" "Cubed" "Cubed" "One third X cubed" "One third X cubed" The waitress leaves, and the other professor comes back. They resume their conversation until a few minutes later when the waitress brings their food. The professor says to the waitress, "Say, do you mind if I ask you something?" "Not at all" "Can you tell me what the integral of x squared dx is?" The waitress pauses, then says, "One third x cubed." As she walks away, she stops, turns, and adds, "Plus a constant!" -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Some famous mathematician was to give a keynote speech at a conference. Asked for an advance summary, he said he would present a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem -- but they should keep it under their hats. When he arrived, though, he spoke on a much more prosaic topic. Afterwards the conference organizers asked why he said he'd talk about the theorem and then didn't. He replied this was his standard practice, just in case he was killed on the way to the conference. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q: How many numerical analysts does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: 0.9973 after the first three iterations. Q: How many topologists does it take to change a light bulb? A: It really doesn't matter, since they'd rather knot. Q: How many mathematicians does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: Just one, once you've managed to present the problem in terms he/she is familiar with. Q: How many light bulbs does it take to change a light bulb? A: One, if it knows its own Goedel number. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Physics professor is walking across campus, runs into Math Professor. Physics professor has been doing an experiment, and has worked out an empirical equation that seems to explain his data, and asks the Math professor to look at it. A week later, they meet again, and the Math professor says the equation is invalid. By then, the Physics professor has used his equation to predict the results of further experiments, and he is getting excellent results, so he askes the Math professor to look again. Another week goes by, and they meet once more. The Math professor tells the Physics professor the equation does work, "But only in the trivial case where the numbers are real and positive." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "IF" If you can solve a literal equation And rationalise denominator surds, Do grouping factors (with a transformation) And state the factor theorem in words; If you can plot the graph of any function And do a long division (with gaps), Or square binomials without compunction Or work cube roos with logs without mishaps. If you possess a sound and clear-cut notion Of interest sums with P and I unknown; If you can find the speed of trains in motion, Given some lengths and "passing-times" alone; If you can play with R (both big and little) And feel at home with l (or h) and Pi, And learn by cancellation how to whittle Your fractions down till they delight the eye. If you can recognise the segment angles Both at the centre and circumference; If you can spot equivalent triangles And Friend Pythagoras (his power's immmense); If you can see that equiangularity And congruence are two things and not one, You may pick up a mark or two in charity And, what is more, you may squeeze through, my son. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 'Tis a favorite project of mine A new value of pi to assign. I would fix it at 3 For it's simpler, you see, Than 3 point 1 4 1 5 9. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If inside a circle a line Hits the center and goes spine to spine And the line's length is "d" the circumference will be d times 3.14159 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If (1+x) (real close to 1) Is raised to the power of 1 Over x, you will find Here's the value defined: 2.718281... -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A mathematician named Klein Thought the Mobius Band was divine. Said he, "If you glue The edges of two You get a weird bottle like mine." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A challenge for many long ages Had baffled the savants and sages. Yet at last came the light: Seems old Fermat was right-- To the margin add 200 pages. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A graduate student at Trinity Computed the square of infinity. But it gave him the fidgets To put down the digits, So he dropped math and took up divinity. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Pi goes on and on and on ... And e is just as cursed. I wonder: Which is larger When their digits are reversed? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A burleycue dancer, a pip Named Virginia, could peel in a zip; But she read science fiction and died of constriction Attempting a Moebius strip. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A mathematician confided That a Moebius strip is one-sided. You' get quite a laugh If you cut it in half, For it stay in one piece when divided. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In Arctic and Tropical Climes, The Integers, addition, and times, Taken (mod p) will yield, A full finite field, As p ranges over the primes. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If n in a Taylor series goes 2 to 11 by threes for x = 1 convergence is done 'twixt zero and two, I believe. |