Contents =1. The mathematician, the physicist and the engineer (and others) =2. Mathematics =2.1 proofs =2.2 statistics and statisticans =2.3 mathematicians =2.4 poetry =2.5 quotes =3. physics =3.1 poetry =3.2 quotes =4. chemistry =4.1 poetry =4.2 quotes =5. miscellany =5.1 rules for research =5.2 rules for writing an article =5.3 poetry =5.4 quotes =6. anecdotes about scientists =7. mnemonics =7.1 mnemonics =7.2 mathematics =7.3 computer science =7.4 physics =7.5 chemistry =7.6 biology and medicine =7.7 miscellany =8. pranks ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ =1. THE MATHEMATICIAN, THE PHYSICIST AND THE ENGINEER (AND OTHER PROFESSIONS) MPE________________________________________________________________________ jwest@jwest.ecen.okstate.edu: A mathmatician, a physicist, and an engineer were all given a red rubber ball and told to find the volume. The mathmatician carefully measured the diamaeter and evaluated a triple integral. The physicist filled a beaker with water, put the ball in the water, and measured the total displacement. The engineer looked up the model and serial numbers in his red-rubber-ball table. If it was my company: The engineer tried to look up the model and serial numbers, couldn't find them, so told his manager that it's just not going to work. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: pascual@tid.es (Pascual de Juan Nuqez) Three men, a physican, a engineer and a computer scientist, are travelling in a car. Suddenly, the car starts to smoke and stops. The three atonished men try to solve the problem: - Physican says: This is obviously a classic problem of torque. It has been overloaded the elasticity limit of the main axis. - Engineer says : Let's be serious! The matter is that it has been burned the spark of the connecting rod to the dynamo of the radiator. I can easily repair it by hammering. - Computer scientist says : What if we get off the car, wait a minute, and then get in and try again? MEA________________________________________________________________________ An engineer, a mathematician, and a computer programmer are driving down the road when the car they are in gets a flat tire. The engineer says that they should buy a new car. The mathematician says they should sell the old tire and buy a new one. The computer programmer says they should drive the car around the block and see if the tire fixes itself. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Logician: Hypothesis: All odd numbers are prime Proof: 1) If a proof exists, then the hypothesis must be true 2) The proof exists; you're reading it now. From 1 and 2 follows that all odd numbers are prime MEA________________________________________________________________________ The problem with engineers is that they tend to cheat in order to get results. The problem with mathematicians is that they tend to work on toy problems in order to get results. The problem with program verifiers is that they tend to cheat at toy problems in order to get results. ME_________________________________________________________________________ From: levd@alien (Lev Desmarais) The difference between an Engineer and a Mathematician : The Engineer walks in her office and finds her trash can on fire. She gets the fire extinguisher and puts out the fire. The Mathematician walks in his office and finds his trash can on fire. He gets the fire extinguisher and puts out the fire. The following day : The Engineer walks in her office and finds the trash can on fire on top of her desk. She gets the fire extinguisher and put out the fire. The Mathematician walks in his office and finds the trash can on fire on top of his desk. He takes the trash can and puts it on the floor. He has reduced the problem to a previously solved state. Too solve it again would be redundant. MPE________________________________________________________________________ An engineer, a mathematician, and a physicist are staying in three adjoining cabins at a decrepit old motel. First the engineer's coffee maker catches fire on the bathroom vanity. He smells the smoke, wakes up, unplugs it, throws it out the window, and goes back to sleep. Later that night the physicist smells smoke too. He wakes up and sees that a cigarette butt has set the trash can on fire. He says to himself, "Hmm. How does one put out a fire? One can reduce the temperature of the fuel below the flash point, isolate the burning material from oxygen, or both. This could be accomplished by applying water." So he picks up the trash can, puts it in the shower stall, turns on the water, and, when the fire is out, goes back to sleep. The mathematician, of course, has been watching all this out the window. So later, when he finds that his pipe ashes have set the bedsheet on fire, he is not in the least taken aback. He immediately sees that the problem reduces to one that has already been solved and goes back to sleep. MPE________________________________________________________________________ A mathematician, an engineer, and a physicist are being interviewed for a job. In each case, the interview goes along famously until the last question is asked: "How much is one plus one?" Each of them suspects a trap, and is hesitant to answer. The mathematician thinks for a moment, and says "I'm not sure, but I think it converges". THe physicist says "I'm not sure, but I think it's on the order of one" THe engineer gets up, closes the door to the office, and says "How much do you want it to be?". MP_________________________________________________________________________ An engineer, a physicist, a mathematician and a statistician are taken , one at a time, into a room to undergo a psychological test. In the room is a table (upon which is a pad and pencil), a chair, a bucket of water, and a waste basket rigged so that it can be set ablaze from an adjacent room in which the psychologists watch. THe engineer is first, and the basket is set ablaze. The engineer immediately jumps up, grabs the bucket of water and dashes the entire thing onto the fire, flooding the entire room and extinguishing the fire. THe physicist is next. THe basket ignites, the physicist quickly calculates exactly how much water is required to extinguish the flames and pours exactly that amount, neatly extinguishing the flames. THe mathematician next. THe basket blazes up, the mathematician calculates exactly how much water is required to put out the fire, and then walks out of the room. THe statistician is last. THe basket is ignited. He grabs the bucket, pours half on one side, half on the other, and announces "it's out". E__________________________________________________________________________ The graduate with a Science degree asks, "Why does it work?" The graduate with an Engineering degree asks, "How does it work?" The graduate with an Accounting degree asks, "How much will it cost?" The graduate with a Liberal Arts degree asks, "Do you want mustard with that?" MPCE_______________________________________________________________________ A lecturer tells some students to learn the phone-book by heart. The mathematicians are baffled: `By heart? You kidding?' The physics-students ask: `Why?' The engineers sigh: `Do we have to?' The chemistry-students ask: `Till next Monday?' The accounting-students (scribbling): `Till tomorrow?' The laws-students answer: `We already have.' The medicine-students ask: `Should we start on the Yellow Pages?' MPE________________________________________________________________________ The engineer thinks of his equations as an approximation to reality. The physicist thinks reality is an approximation to his equations. The mathematician doesn't care. MPB________________________________________________________________________ Three men with degrees in mathmatics, physics and biology are locked up in dark rooms for research reasons. A week later the researchers open the a door, the biologist steps out and reports: `Well, I sat around until I started to get bored, then I searched the room and found a tin which I smashed on the floor. There was food in it which I ate when I got hungry. That's it.' Then they free the man with the degree in physics and he says: `I walked along the walls to get an image of the room's geometry, then I searched it. There was a metal cylinder at five feet into the room and two feet left of the door. It felt like a tin and I threw it at the left wall at the right angle and velocity for it to crack open.' Finally, the researchers open the third door and hear a faint voice out of the darkness: `Let C be an open can.' M__________________________________________________________________________ A Mathematician, a Biologist and a Physicist are sitting in a street cafe watching people going in and coming out of the house on the other side of the street. First they see two people going into the house. Time passes. After a while they notice three persons coming out of the house. The Physicist: "The measurement wasn't accurate.". The Biologists conclusion: "They have reproduced". The Mathematician: "If now exactly 1 person enters the house then it will be empty again." ME_________________________________________________________________________ Three engineering students were gathered together discussing the possible designers of the human body. One said, ``It was a mechanical engineer. Just look at all the joints.'' Another said, ``No, it was an electrical engineer. The nervous system has many thousands of electrical connections.'' The last said, ``Actually it was a civil engineer. Who else would run a toxic waste pipeline through a recreational area?'' MPE________________________________________________________________________ An engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician are shown a pasture with a herd of sheep, and told to put them inside the smallest possible amount of fence. The engineer is first. He herds the sheep into a circle and then puts the fence around them, declaring, "A circle will use the least fence for a given area, so this is the best solution." The physicist is next. She creates a circular fence of infinite radius around the sheep, and then draws the fence tight around the herd, declaring, "This will give the smallest circular fence around the herd." The mathematician is last. After giving the problem a little thought, he puts a small fence around himself and then declares, "I define myself to be on the outside!" MPE________________________________________________________________________ Four men were sitting one day discussing how smart their dog's were. The first man was an Engineer, who said his dog could do math. His dog was named T-Square, and he told him to get some paper and draw a square, a circle, and a triangle, which the dog did with no sweat. The Accountant said that his dog was better. His dog, Slide Rule, was told to fetch a dozen cookies, bring them back, and divide them into piles of 3, which Slide Rule did with no problem. The Chemist said his dog was smarter, his dog named Measure, was told to get a quart of milk, and pour 7 ounces into a 10 ounce glass. The dog did this with no trouble at all, and all three men agreed that their dog's were equally smart. Then they turned to the Union Member and asked, what can your dog do? The Union Member called his dog, who was named Coffee Break, and said, "Show the fellows what you can do". Coffee Break went over and ate the cookies, drank the milk, shit on the paper, fucked the other dogs, and claimed he injured his back while doing so, filed a grievence report for unsafe working conditions, put in for Workmens Compensation, and left for home on sick leave. MP_________________________________________________________________________ A mathematician and a physicist are given the task of describing a room. They both go in, and spend hours meticulously writing down every detail, each turning in nearly a ream of paper. The next day, the room is changed, and they are again given the task. The physicist spends the better part of the day, but the mathematician, amazingly enough, leaves within a minute. he hands in a single sheet of paper with the following description: Put picture back on wall to return to previously solved state. ME_________________________________________________________________________ What is "pi"? Mathematician: Pi is the number expressing the relationship between the circumference of a circle and its diameter. Physicist: Pi is 3.1415927 plus or minus 0.000000005 Engineer: Pi is about 3. MPE________________________________________________________________________ An assemblage of the most gifted minds in the world were all posed the following question: "What is 2 * 2 ?" The chemist says immediately circa 10 to the power 1. The engineer whips out his slide rule (so it's old) and shuffles it back and forth, and finally announces "3.99". The physicist consults his technical references, sets up the problem on his computer, and announces "it lies between 3.98 and 4.02". The mathematician cogitates for a while, oblivious to the rest of the world, then announces: "I don't what the answer is, but I can tell you, an answer exists!". Philosopher: "But what do you _mean_ by 2 * 2 ?" Logician: "Please define 2 * 2 more precisely." Accountant: Closes all the doors and windows, looks around carefully, then asks "What do you _want_ the answer to be?" Computer Hacker: Breaks into the NSA super-computer and gives the answer. MP_________________________________________________________________________ From: MARTIN.VIETOR@HEIDEBOX.HEIDE.DE (Translation to blame on Joachim) A mathematician, a physicist and a doctor were posed the questin 2*2. The physicist takes a notebook and starts scribbling. After 3 days of the most complex calculations he finds with use of the Earth radius, the gravitation constant : "Somewhere between pi and 2 times the square root of 3." The mathematican comes back after a week with dark rings under his eyes and proclaims: "Colleges, their is a solution." The doctor says simple :"4" The others answer: "Oh well you memorized it." MPA________________________________________________________________________ From: "F. Ted Tschang" An economist, an engineer, and a physicist are marooned on a deserted island. One day they find a can of food washed up on the beach and contrive to open it. The engineer said: "let's hammer the can open between these rocks". The physicist said: "that's pretty crude. We can just use the force of gravity by dropping a rock on the can from that tall tree over there". The economist is somewhat disgusted at these deliberations, and says: "I've got a much more elegant solution. All we have to do is assume a can-opener." E__________________________________________________________________________ In some foreign country a priest, a lawyer and an engineer are about to be guillotined. The priest puts his head on the block, they pull the rope and nothing happens -- he declares that he's been saved by divine intervention -- so he's let go. The lawyer is put on the block, and again the rope doesn't release the blade, he claims he can't be executed twice for the same crime and he is set free too. They grab the engineer and shove his head into the guillotine, he looks up at the release mechanism and says, "Wait a minute, I see your problem......" MP_________________________________________________________________________ Einstein dies and goes to heaven only to be informed that his room is not yet ready. "I hope you will not mind waiting in a dormitory. We are very sorry, but it's the best we can do and you will have to share the room with others." he is told by the doorman (say his name is Pete). Einstein says that this is no problem at all and that there is no need to make such a great fuss. So Pete leads him to the dorm. They enter and Albert is introduced to all of the present inhabitants. "See, Here is your first room mate. He has an IQ of 180!" "Why that's wonderful!" Says Albert. "We can discuss mathematics!" "And here is your second room mate. His IQ is 150!" "Why that's wonderful!" Says Albert. "We can discuss physics!" "And here is your third room mate. His IQ is 100!" "That Wonderful! We can discuss the latest plays at the theater!" Just then another man moves out to capture Albert's hand and shake it. "I'm your last room mate and I'm sorry, but my IQ is only 80." Albert smiles back at him and says, "So, where to you think interest rates are headed?" MPE________________________________________________________________________ An engineer, a mathematician, and a physicist went to the races one Saturday and laid their money down. Commiserating in the bar after the race, the engineer says, "I don't understand why I lost all my money. I measured all the horses and calculated their strength and mechanical advantage and figured out how fast they could run..." The physicist interrupted him: "...but you didn't take individual variations into account. I did a statistical analysis of their previous performances and bet on the horses with the highest probability of winning..." "...so if you're so hot why are you broke?" asked the engineer. But before the argument can grow, the mathematician takes out his pipe and they get a glimpse of his well-fattened wallet. Obviously here was a man who knows something about horses. They both demanded to know his secret. "Well," he says, between puffs on the pipe, "first I assumed all the horses were identical and spherical..." MPE________________________________________________________________________ A doctor, an architect, and a computer scientist were arguing about whose profession was the oldest. In the course of their arguments, they got all the way back to the Garden of Eden, whereupon the doctor said, "The medical profession is clearly the oldest, because Eve was made from Adam's rib, as the story goes, and that was a simply incredible surgical feat." The architect did not agree. He said, "But if you look at the Garden itself, in the beginning there was chaos and void, and out of that, the Garden and the world were created. So God must have been an architect." The computer scientist, who had listened to all of this said, "Yes, but where do you think the chaos came from?" MPBE_______________________________________________________________________ From: grayd@is.dal.ca (James D. Gray) An Engineering Student, a Physics Student, and a Mathematics student were each given $150 dollars and were told to use that money to find out exactly how tall a particular hotel was. All three ran off, extremely keen on how to do this. The Physics student went out, purchased some stopwatches, a number of ball bearings, a calculator, and some friends. He had them all time the drop of ball bearings from the roof, and he then figured out the height from the time it took for the bearings to accelerate from rest until they impacted with the sidewalk. The Math student waited until the sun was going down, then she took out her protractor, plumb line, measuring tape,and scratch pad, measured the length of the shadow, found the angle the buildings roof made from the ground, and used trignometry to figure out the height of the building. These two students bumped into the Engineering student the next day, who was nursing a really bad hangover. When asked what he did to find the height of the building he replied: "Well, I walked up to the bell hop, gave him 10 bucks, asked him how tall the hotel was, and hit the bar inside for happy hour!" *MP________________________________________________________________________ An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician find themselves in an anecdote, indeed an anecdote quite similar to many that you have no doubt already heard. After some observations and rough calculations the engineer realizes the situation and starts laughing. A few minutes later the physicist understands too and chuckles to himself happily as he now has enough experimental evidence to publish a paper. This leaves the mathematician somewhat perplexed, as he had observed right away that he was the subject of an anecdote, and deduced quite rapidly the presence of humour from similar anecdotes, but considers this anecdote to be too trivial a corollary to be significant, let alone funny. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Three scientists met at a convention, and decided to tell jokes. But being efficient guys, they decided to save time by merely giving the number of the joke as listed in the joke FAQ rather than telling the whole joke. So one scientist would blurt out "167", and all of them would laugh. Then another would say "233", and they'd all laugh. Then one scientist said "199", and they all laughed. But then one of the scientists just kept laughing and the other two couldn't get him to quit. So they asked him why he keeps laughing. He said, "I've never heard that joke before." Sorry for wasting bandwidth. I should have just said "368". -------------------------------------------------------------------- =2. MATHEMATICS M__________________________________________________________________________ From: guest@se.alcbel.be: rafy@cairo.anu.edu.au (Rafy Marootians): Logic is a systematic method for getting the wrong conclusion... with confidence. Surely _statistics_ is a systematic method for getting the wrong conclusion... with 95% confidence. From: phk@data.fls.dk (Poul-Henning Kamp/P-HK) Mathematics is the systematic misuse of a nomenclature developed for that specific purpose. M__________________________________________________________________________ From: chrisman@ucdmath.ucdavis.edu (Mark Chrisman) Most prime numbers are even. Proof: pick up any math text and look for a prime number. The first one you find will probably be even. M__________________________________________________________________________ Once upon a time, when I was training to be a mathematician, a group of us bright young students taking number theory discovered the names of the smaller prime numbers. 2: The Odd Prime -- It's the only even prime, therefore is odd. QED. 3: The True Prime -- Lewis Carroll: "If I tell you three times, it's true." 31: The Arbitrary Prime -- Determined by unanimous unvote. We needed an arbitrary prime in case the prof asked for one, and so had an election. 91 received the most votes (well, it *looks* prime) and 3+4i the next most. However, 31 was the only candidate to receive none at all. Since the composite numbers are formed from primes, their qualities are derived from those primes. So, for instance, the number 6 is "odd but true", while the powers of 2 are all extremely odd numbers. M__________________________________________________________________________ From: Tpotter@voyager.cris.com (Tom_Potter) Tom Potter: Life is complex. It has real and imaginary components. M__________________________________________________________________________ From: Erland.Gadde@sm.luth.se (Erland Gadde) Trigonometry for farmers: swine and cowswine. M__________________________________________________________________________ From: mstueben@pen.k12.va.us (Michael A. Stueben) I liked the PI-ous one best. M__________________________________________________________________________ Q: What does an analytic number theoriest say when he is drowning? A: Log-log, log-log, log-log, . . . M__________________________________________________________________________ From: Alan Craig Mathematicians have announced the existence of a new whole number which lies between 27 and 28. "We don't know why it's there or what it does," says Cambridge mathematician, Dr. Hilliard Haliard, "we only know that it doesn't behave properly when put into equations, and that it is divisible by six, though only once." M__________________________________________________________________________ From: chrisman@ucdmath.ucdavis.edu (Mark Chrisman) "The number you have dialed is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again." M__________________________________________________________________________ From: david_gonda@qm.yale.edu A student was doing miserably on his oral final exam in General Toplogy (yes, this guy _really_ did give oral finals in topology). Exasperated by the student's abysmal performance up to that point, the professor asked the student "So, what _do_ you know about topology?" The student replied, "I know the definition of a topologist." The professor asked him to state the definition, expecting to get the old saw about someone who can't tell the difference between a coffee cup and a doughnut. Instead, the student replied: "A topologist is someone who can't tell the difference between his ass and a hole in the ground, but who can tell the difference between his ass and _two_ holes in the ground." The student passed. M__________________________________________________________________________ Definitions of Terms Commonly Used in Higher Math The following is a guide to the weary student of mathematics who is often confronted with terms which are commonly used but rarely defined. In the search for proper definitions for these terms we found no authoritative, nor even recognized, source. Thus, we followed the advice of mathematicians handed down from time immortal: "Wing It." CLEARLY: I don't want to write down all the "in- between" steps. TRIVIAL: If I have to show you how to do this, you're in the wrong class. OBVIOUSLY: I hope you weren't sleeping when we discussed this earlier, because I refuse to repeat it. RECALL: I shouldn't have to tell you this, but for those of you who erase your memory tapes after every test... WLOG (Without Loss Of Generality): I'm not about to do all the possible cases, so I'll do one and let you figure out the rest. IT CAN EASILY BE SHOWN: Even you, in your finite wisdom, should be able to prove this without me holding your hand. CHECK or CHECK FOR YOURSELF: This is the boring part of the proof, so you can do it on your own time. SKETCH OF A PROOF: I couldn't verify all the details, so I'll break it down into the parts I couldn't prove. HINT: The hardest of several possible ways to do a proof. BRUTE FORCE (AND IGNORANCE): Four special cases, three counting arguments, two long inductions, "and a partridge in a pair tree." SOFT PROOF: One third less filling (of the page) than your regular proof, but it requires two extra years of course work just to understand the terms. ELEGANT PROOF: Requires no previous knowledge of the subject matter and is less than ten lines long. SIMILARLY: At least one line of the proof of this case is the same as before. CANONICAL FORM: 4 out of 5 mathematicians surveyed recommended this as the final form for their students who choose to finish. TFAE (The Following Are Equivalent): If I say this it means that, and if I say that it means the other thing, and if I say the other thing... BY A PREVIOUS THEOREM: I don't remember how it goes (come to think of it I'm not really sure we did this at all), but if I stated it right (or at all), then the rest of this follows. TWO LINE PROOF: I'll leave out everything but the conclusion, you can't question 'em if you can't see 'em. BRIEFLY: I'm running out of time, so I'll just write and talk faster. LET'S TALK THROUGH IT: I don't want to write it on the board lest I make a mistake. PROCEED FORMALLY: Manipulate symbols by the rules without any hint of their true meaning (popular in pure math courses). QUANTIFY: I can't find anything wrong with your proof except that it won't work if x is a moon of Jupiter (Popular in applied math courses). PROOF OMITTED: Trust me, It's true. M__________________________________________________________________________ From: mstueben@pen.k12.va.us (Michael A. Stueben) WHAT'S OUT AND WHAT'S IN FOR MATHEMATICAL TERMS by Michael Stueben (November 7, 1994) --------------------------------------------------------- Today it is considered an egregious faux pas to speak or write in the crude antedated terms of our grandfathers. To assist the isolated student and the less sophisticated teacher, I have prepared the following list of currently fashionable mathematical terms in academia. I pass this list on to the general public as a matter of charity and in the hope that it will lead to more refined elucidation from young scholars. OUT IN thinking: hypothesizing. proof by contradiction or indirect proof: reductio ad absurdum. mistake: non sequitur. starting place: handle. with corresponding changes: mutatis mutandis. counterexample: pathological exception. consequently: ipso facto. swallowing results: digesting proofs. therefore: ergo. has an easy-to-understand, but hard-to-find solution: obvious. has two easy-to-understand, but hard-to-find solutions: trivial. truth: tautology. empty: vacuous. drill problems: plug-and-chug work. criteria: rubric. example: substantive instantiation. similar structure: homomorphic. very similar structure: isomorphic. same area: isometric. arithmetic: number theory. count: enumerate. one: unity. generally/specifically: globally/locally. constant: invariant. bonus result: corollary. distance: metric measure. several: a plurality. function/argument: operator/operand. separation/joining: bifurcation/confluence. fourth power or quartic: biquadratic. random: stochastic. unique condition: a singularity. uniqueness: unicity. tends to zero: vanishes. tip-top point: apex. half-closed: half-open. concave: non-convex. rectangular prisms: parallelepipeds. perpendicular (adj.): orthogonal. perpendicular (n.): normal. Euclid: Descartes. Fermat: Wiles. path: trajectory. shift: rectilinear translation. similar: homologous. very similar: congruent. whopper-jawed: skew or oblique. change direction: perturb. join: concatenate. approximate to two or more places: accurate. high school geometry or plane geometry: geometry of the Euclidean plane under the Pythagorean metric. clever scheme: algorithm. initialize to zero: zeroize. * : splat. { : squiggle. decimal: denary. alphabetical order: lexical order. a divide-and-conquer method: an algorithm of logarithmic order. student ID numbers: witty passwords. that bitch secretary in the math dept: the witch of Agnesi numerology and number sophistry: descriptive statistics Special thanks to Peter Braxton who got me started writing this stuff and who contributed five of the items above. M__________________________________________________________________________ From: goddard@NeXTwork.Rose-Hulman.Edu (Bart E. Goddard) & rja093@nwu.edu (Rajan Jain) mathematician's PICK UP LINE Hey baby, How would you like to join me in some math? We'll add you and me, subtract our clothes, divide your legs, and multiply! Of course, we'll be entirely discrete. M__________________________________________________________________________ From: hammond@cs.utk.edu (James Michael Hammond) When Mathematicians Go Bad "Psst, c'mere," said the shifty-eyed man wearing a long black trenchcoat, as he beckoned me off the rainy street into a damp dark alley. I followed. "What are you selling?" I asked. "Geometrical algebra drugs." "Huh!?" "Geometry drugs. Ya got your uppers, your downers, your sidewaysers, your inside-outers..." "Stop right there," I interrupted. "I've never heard of inside- outers." "Oh, man, you'll love 'em. Makes you feel like M.C. ever-lovin' Escher on a particularly weird day." "Go on..." "OK, your inside-outers, your arbitrary bilinear mappers, and here, heh, here are the best ones," he said, pulling out a large clear bottle of orange pills. "What are those, then?" I asked. "Givens transformers. They'll rotate you about more planes than you even knew existed." "Sounds gross. What about those bilinear mappers?" "There's a whole variety of them. Here's one you'll love -- they call it 'One Over Z' on the street. Take one of these little bad boys and you'll be on speaking terms with the Point at Infinity." M__________________________________________________________________________ From: v090nlb4@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu (Mark J. VanDerwater) halloween math Q: Wadaya get when you take the circumference of your jack-o-lantern and divide it by its diameter? A: Pumpkin Pi M__________________________________________________________________________ UR 2 Good 2 Me 2 Be 4 Got == 10 "You are too good to me to be forgotten" M__________________________________________________________________________ A lazy dog is a slow pup. A slope up is an inclined plane. An ink-lined plane is a sheet of writing-paper. Therefore lazy dog is a sheet of writing-paper. M__________________________________________________________________________ Complete the next two terms of this sequence: O T T F F S S E .. .. (A. N T - Nine Ten) Likewise here: 3 3 5 4 4 3 5 5 (A. 4 3 -number of letters in the words "nine" and "ten"). M__________________________________________________________________________ The four branches of arithmetic - ambition, distraction, uglification and derision. (Lewis Caroll: "Alice in Wonderland") ME_________________________________________________________________________ The first law of Engineering Mathematics: All infinite series converge, and moreover converge to the first term. M__________________________________________________________________________ Numb, adj., devoid of sensation... Number, comparative of numb. [Webster's Third New international Dictionary] M__________________________________________________________________________ Patageometry, n.: The study of those mathematical properties that are invariant under brain transplants. M__________________________________________________________________________ kcarver@fox.nstn.ns.ca (Kevin Carver) writes: I know most of you people who are "into" math have heard the pun (over and over and over ...) about knowing the difference between your "asymptote and a hole in the graph" but here's one you may not have heard. IT'S A TRUE STORY! A student at our high school a few years back, having had his fill with drawing graph after graph in senior high math class, told his teacher: Mrs. ___, I'll do algebra, I'll do trig, and I'll even do statistics, but graphing is where I draw the line! M__________________________________________________________________________ "Algebraic symbols are used when you do not know what you are talking about." M__________________________________________________________________________ Lumberjacks make good musicians because of their natural logarithms. M__________________________________________________________________________ From: Dr. David Batchelor batchelor@nssdca.gsfc.nasa.gov: Theorem: Consider the set of all sets that have never been considered. Hey! They're all gone!! Oh, well, never mind... M__________________________________________________________________________ Pie are not square. Pie are round. Cornbread are square. M__________________________________________________________________________ This was made by Mike Bender and Sarah Herr: MATHEMATICS PURITY TEST Count the number of yes's, subtract from 60, and divide by 0.6. The Basics 1) Have you ever been excited about math? 2) Had an exciting dream about math? 3) Made a mathematical calculation? 4) Manipulated the numerator of an equation? 5) Manipulated the denominator of an equation? 6) On your first problem set? 7) Worked on a problem set past 3:00 a.m.? 8) Worked on a problem set all night? 9) Had a hard problem? 10) Worked on a problem continuously for more than 30 minutes? 11) Worked on a problem continuously for more than four hours? 12) Done more than one problem set on the same night (i.e. both started and finished them)? 13) Done more than three problem sets on the same night? 14) Taken a math course for a full year? 15) Taken two different math courses at the same time? 16) Done at least one problem set a week for more than four months? 17) Done at least one problem set a night for more than one month (weekends excluded)? 18) Done a problem set alone? 19) Done a problem set in a group of three or more? 20) Done a problem set in a group of 15 or more? 21) Was it mixed company? 22) Have you ever inadvertently walked in upon people doing a problem set? 23) And joined in afterwards? 24) Have you ever used food doing a problem set? 25) Did you eat it all? 26) Have you ever had a domesticated pet or animal walk over you while you were doing a problem set? 27) Done a problem set in a public place where you might be discovered? 28) Been discovered while doing a problem set? Kinky Stuff 29) Have you ever applied your math to a hard science? 30) Applied your math to a soft science? 31) Done an integration by parts? 32) Done two integration by parts in a single problem? 33) Bounded the domain and range of your function? 34) Used the domination test for improper integrals? 35) Done Newton's Method? 36) Done the Method of Frobenius? 37) Used the Sandwich Theorem? 38) Used the Mean Value Theorem? 39) Used a Gaussian surface? 40) Used a foreign object on a math problem (eg: calculator)? 41) Used a program to improve your mathematical technique (eg: MACSYMA)? 42) Not used brackets when you should have? 43) Integrated a function over its full period? 44) Done a calculation in three-dimensional space? 45) Done a calculation in n-dimensional space? 46) Done a change of bases? 47) Done a change of bases specifically in order to magnify your vector? 48) Worked through four complete bases in a single night (eg: using the Graham-Schmidt method)? 49) Inserted a number into an equation? 50) Calculated the residue of a pole? 51) Scored perfectly on a math test? 52) Swallowed everything your professor gave you? 53) Used explicit notation in your problem set? 54) Purposefully omitted important steps in your problem set? 55) Padded your own problem set? 56) Been blown away on a test? 57) Blown away your professor on a test? 58) Have you ever multiplied 23 by 3? 59) Have you ever bounded your Bessel function so that the membrane did not shoot to infinity? 69) Have you ever understood the following quote: "The relationship between Z^0 to C_0, B_0, and H_0 is an example of a general principle which we have encountered: the kernel of the adjoint of a linear transformation is both the annihilator space of the image of the transformation and also the dual space of the quotient of the space of which the image is a subspace by the image subspace." (Shlomo & Bamberg's _A "Course" in Mathematics for Students of Physics_) M__________________________________________________________________________ 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." M__________________________________________________________________________ There are three kinds of people in the world; those who can count and those who can't. And the related: There are two groups of people in the world; those who believe that the world can be divided into two groups of people, and those who don't. M__________________________________________________________________________ The world is divided into two classes: people who say "The world is divided into two classes", and people who say The world is divided into two classes: people who say: "The world is divided into two classes", and people who say: The world is divided into two classes: people who say ... M__________________________________________________________________________ What follows is a "quiz" a student of mine once showed me (which she'd gotten from a previous teacher, etc...). It's multiple choice, and if you sort the letters (with upper and lower case disjoint) questions and answers will come out next to each other. Enjoy... S. What the acorn said when he grew up N. bisects u. A dead parrot g. center F. What you should do when it rains R. hypotenuse m. A geometer who has been to the beach H. coincide h. The set of cards is missing y. polygon A. The boy has a speech defect t. secant K. How they schedule gym class p. tangent b. What he did when his mother-in-law wanted to go home D. ellipse O. The tall kettle boiling on the stove W. geometry r. Why the girl doesn't run a 4-minute mile j. decagon M__________________________________________________________________________ ___ 1. That which Noah built. ___ 2. An article for serving ice cream. ___ 3. What a bloodhound does in chasing a woman. ___ 4. An expression to represent the loss of a parrot. ___ 5. An appropriate title for a knight named Koal. ___ 6. A sunburned man. ___ 7. A tall coffee pot perking. ___ 8. What one does when it rains. ___ 9. A dog sitting in a refrigerator. ___ 10. What a boy does on the lake when his motor won't run. ___ 11. What you call a person who writes for an inn. ___ 12. What the captain said when the boat was bombed. ___ 13. What a little acorn says when he grows up. ___ 14. What one does to trees that are in the way. ___ 15. What you do if you have yarn and needles. ___ 16. Can George Washington turn into a country? A. hypotenuse I. circle B. polygon J. axiom C. inscribe K. cone D. geometry L. coincide E. unit M. cosecant F. center N. tangent G. decagone O. hero H. arc P. perpendicular M__________________________________________________________________________ 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!" M__________________________________________________________________________ A function and a differentiation operator meet somewhere in Hilbert space. The differentation operator: Make place or I differentiate you. Function: Forget it buster, I am e^x. The differentation operator: Well, I am d/dy. M__________________________________________________________________________ Boy's Life, May 1973: Ralph: Dad, will you do my math for me tonight? Dad: No, son, it wouldn't be right. Ralph: Well, you could try. M__________________________________________________________________________ In the bayous of Louisiana, there is a small river called the Dirac. Many wealthy people have their mansions near its mouth. One of the social leaders decided to have a grand ball. Being a cousin of the Governor, she arranged for a detachment of the state militia to serve as guards and traffic directors for the big doings. A captain was sent over with a small company; naturally he asked if there was enough room for him and his unit. The social leader replied, "But of course, Captain! It is well known that the Dirac delta function has unit area." M__________________________________________________________________________ When I was a Math/Chem grad student at Princeton in 1973-74, there was a story going around about a grad student. This guy was always late. One day he stumbled into class late, saw seven problems written on the board, and wrote them down. As the week went on he began to panic: the math department at Princeton is fiercely competitive, and here he was unable to do most of a simple homework assignment! When the next class rolled around he only had solved two of the problems, although he had a pretty good idea of how to solve a third but not enough time to complete it. When he dejectedly flung his partial assignment on the prof's desk, the prof asked him "What's that?" "The homework." "What homework?" Eventually it came out that what the prof had written on the board were the seven most important unsolved problems in the field. This is largely an academic legend, at least according to Jan Harold Brunvand, the author of a series of books on so-called Urban Legends. He talks about it in his latest book _Curses! Broiled Again!_ in the chapter entitled "The Unsolvable Math Problem." It is, however, based in some fact. The Stanford mathematician, George B. Danzig, apparently managed to solve two statistics problems previously unsolved under similar circumstances. M__________________________________________________________________________ Russell to Whitehead: "My Godel is killing me!" M__________________________________________________________________________ "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." M__________________________________________________________________________ One attractive young businesswoman to another, over lunch: ``My life is all math. I am trying to add to my income, subtract from my weight, divide my time, and avoid multiplying.'' M__________________________________________________________________________ We use epsilons and deltas in mathematics because mathematicians tend to make errors. M__________________________________________________________________________ A mathematician decides he wants to learn more about practical problems. He sees a seminar with a nice title: "The Theory of Gears." So he goes. The speaker stands up and begins, "The theory of gears with a real number of teeth is well known ..." M__________________________________________________________________________ What keeps a square from moving ? why, square roots of course. How many square roots does it have ? why, 2 obviously. M__________________________________________________________________________ How can you tell that Harvard was layed out by a mathematician? The div school [divinity school] is right next to the grad school... M__________________________________________________________________________ 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. M__________________________________________________________________________ Godel can't prove he was here. Descartes though he was here. M__________________________________________________________________________ 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...' M__________________________________________________________________________ He thinks he's really smooth, but he's only C^1. He's always going off on a tangent. M__________________________________________________________________________ 8 5 If lim - = oo (infinity), then what does lim - = ? x->0 x x->0 x answer: (write 5 on it's side) M__________________________________________________________________________ I saw the following scrawled on a math office blackboard in college: 1 + 1 = 3, for large values of 1 M__________________________________________________________________________ lim ---- 8-->9 \/ 8 = 3 M__________________________________________________________________________ Fuller's Law of Cosmic Irreversability: 1 pot T --> 1 pot P but 1 pot P -/-> 1 pot T M__________________________________________________________________________ From: surd@apollo.hanyang.ac.kr (ps park (Seoul Univ.)) From: chrisman@ucdmath.ucdavis.edu (Mark Chrisman) (many additions) HOW TO PUT AN ELEPHANT INTO A REFRIGERATOR: Analysis: 1) Differentiate it and put into the refrig. Then integrate it in the refrig. 2) Redefine the measure on the referigerator (or the elephant). 3) Apply the Banach-Tarsky theorem. Number theory: 1) First factorize, second multiply. 2) Use induction. You can always squeeze a bit more in. Algebra: 1) Step 1. Show that the parts of it can be put into the refrig. Step 2. Show that the refrig. is closed under the addition. 2) Take the appropriate universal refrigerator and get a surjection from refrigerator to elephant. Topology: 1) Have it swallow the refrig. and turn inside out. 2) Make a refrig. with the Klein bottle. 3) The elephant is homeomorphic to a smaller elephant. 4) The elephant is compact, so it can be put into a finite collection of refrigerators. That's usually good enough. 5) The property of being inside the referigerator is hereditary. So, take the elephant's mother, cremate it, and show that the ashes fit inside the refrigerator. 6) For those who object to method 3 because it's cruel to animals. Put the elephant's BABY in the refrigerator. Algebraic topology: Replace the interior of the refrigerator by its universal cover, R^3. Linear algebra: 1) Put just its basis and span it in the refrig. 2) Show that 1% of the elephant will fit inside the refrigerator. By linearity, x% will fit for any x. Affine geometry: There is an affine transformation putting the elephant into the refrigerator. Set theory: 1) It's very easy! refrigerator = { elephant } 2) The elephant and the interior of the refrigerator both have cardinality c. Geometry: Declare the following: Axiom 1. An elephant can be put into a refrigerator. Complex analysis: Put the refrig. at the origin and the elephant outside the unit circle. Then get the image under the inversion. Numerical analysis: 1) Put just its trunk and refer the rest to the error term. 2) Work it out using the Pentium. Statistics: 1) bright statistician. Put its tail as a sample and say "Done." 2) dull statistician. Repeat the experiment pushing the elephant to the refrig. 3) Our NEW study shows that you CAN'T put the elephant in the refrigerator. M__________________________________________________________________________ Math and Alcohol don't mix, so... PLEASE DON'T DRINK AND DERIVE Then there's every parent's scream when their child walks into the room dazed and staggering: OH NO...YOU'VE BEEN TAKING DERIVATIVES!! *M_________________________________________________________________________ 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 does a mathematician do when he's constipated? A: He works it out with a pencil. 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: 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!" From: Jos van Kan Q: What's yellow, linear, normed and complete? A: A Bananach space. From: dmc@sjfc.edu (Dan Cass) Q: What's polite and works for the phone company? A: A deferential operator. M__________________________________________________________________________ Los Angeles High School Math Exam 1. Johnny has an AK47 with a 40 round clip. If he misses 6 out of 10 shots and shoots 15 times each drive by, how many drive by shootings must he conduct before he shoots 50 people? 2. Paul has 2 ounces of cocaine and he sells 10 grams to Jackson for $820, and 2 grams to Billy for $85 per gram. What is the street value of the balance of the cocaine if he doesn't cut it? 3. Willie gets $200 for stealing a BMW, $50 for a Chevy and $100 for a 4x4. If he has stolen two BMWs and three 4x4s, how many Chevys will he have to steal to make $800? 4. If the contents of an average can of spray paint covers 22 square feet and the average letter is eight square feet, how many letters can a teenager spray with eight cans of paint? 5. Hector got six girls in his gang pregnant. There are 27 girls in the gang. What percentage of girls in the gang has Hector knocked up? 6. Kathy gets $125 for sneaking an illegal alien across the border from Mexico. She sneaked three illegals over the border every night for six days but then one of them ripped her off for $500. How much money does she have left? 7. Byron can trade $150 worth of food stamps for two tickets to a Lakers regular season game. If a play-off game costs 20 percent more, how many play-off tickets can he get for $500 in food stamps? From: jdmcmine@coop2.b11.ingr.com (Jeff) Answers to City of Los Angeles High School Math Proficiency Exam 1. Johnny has an AK47 with a 40 round clip. If he misses 6 out of 10 shots and shoots 15 times each drive by, how many drive by shootings must he conduct before he shoots 50 people? Johnny hits 15*(4/10) people per drive by, which means that he will have to participate in 9 drive bys to shoot 50 people. However, he will have completed two drive-by shootings and be just starting the third when he has to reload. Since he only stole a single clip, he'll only have shot 16 people when the homeboys with the UZIs' make Swiss cheese out of him. 2. Pony has 2 ounces of cocaine and he sells an 8 ball to Jackson for $320 and 2 grams to Billy for $85 per gram. What is the street value of the balance of the cocaine if he doesn't cut it? At 454 grams per pound, 2oz of the rock = 56.75 grams. An "8 ball" is 8 grams, so pony has sold 10 grams total and has 46.75 grams left. If he keeps selling 8-balls, he can sell 5 more (for a total of 5*$320=$1,600) and have 6.75 grams for his own nose. If he sells 2 gram packs, he can sell (46/2-23) packs at $85 apiece = (23*$85)=$1,955. However, he could divide it into small parts, bake it up into crack and sell the rocks for an even larger profit. This problem is really more suited for the Gang Multi-Variable Economics Test. 3. Ron is pimping for 3 girls. If the price is $65 for each trick, how many tricks will each have to turn so Ron can pay for his $800 per day crack habit. 800/$64=12 tricks plus a dance. Also, Ron should consider making a deal with Pony from Question #2. 4. Susan wants to cut her 1/2 pound of heroin to make 20% more profit. How many ounces of cut will she need? If she sells the cut heroin at the same price per unit volume, she will need 20% more volume. 20% of 1/2 pound (=8oz) is 1.6oz. So, Susan will need 1.6oz of cut to add to the 8 oz of heroin to get 20% more volume. She will want a cut which looks similar to raw heroin and has approximately the same melting point. Plain sugar or laundry detergent are suggested. Laundry detergent has the added benefit of removing the possibility of customer complaints, but will sharply limit repeat business. 5. Blade gets $200 for stealing a BMW, $50 for a Chevy, and $100 for a 4x4. If he has already stolen 2BMW's and 3 4x4's, how many Chevy's will he have to steal to make $800? Blade has made 2*$200 + 3*$100=$700 dollars from his theft so far. He needs $100 more, so he needs to steal $100/$50=2 more Chevy's. However, he will probably want to steal 4 Chevy's so he can take the extra two and make a really def low-rider. 6. Little Willy is in prison for 6 years for murder. He got $25,000 for the hit. If his common law wife is spending $250 per month, how much money will be left when he gets out of prison and how many years will he get for killing the bitch that spent his money? 6 years*12 months/year*$250/month=$18,000. Little Willy will have $25,000 - $18,000 = $7,000 left when he gets out of prison. If Little Willy kills her in the USA, he should expect to get 6 years. However, if he takes her down to Mexico and buries her scrawny, track-marked butt in the desert, he can get off scott free. 7. If the average can of spray paint covers 22 square feet, and the average letter is 4 square feet, how many letters can a tagger spray with 3 cans of paint? 3 cans of paint will cover 3*22=66 square feet. 66/4=16 letters with a little paint left over to spray in the eyes of the cop who's comin' after you. Or the tagger could do 15 letters and a bitchin' skull. 8. Hector knocked up 6 girls in his gang. There are 27 girls in the gang. What percentage of the girls in the gang has Hector knocked up? 6/27=22% of the girls. However, 2 of them are lying because they've been sleeping with Pedro, Hector's lieutenant. So, in actuality, Hector only knocked up 4/27 or 14.8%. 9. Rosie's sole source of income is shoplifting. If she gets 10 cents on the dollar from her fence, how much merchandise must she shoplift each week to make $250. Solve X/10=250 for X, X=$2,500. 10. Mike carjacked a Chevy Camaro for his date Saturday night with his young 14 year old girlfriend. He was arrested that night while making his girlfriend in the backseat. How much prison time is he looking for for the carjacking and for statutory rape, even though the girl looked legal? Assume no prior convictions in arriving at your answer. Mike is only 12 so he will serve no time and will be making his girlfriend in the lot in someone else's car next Saturday. M__________________________________________________________________________ From: a94petbe@ida.his.se (Peter Bengtsson) In modern mathematics, algebra has become so important that numbers will soon only have symbolic meaning. M__________________________________________________________________________ From: sm@wf-hh.sh.sub.de (Stefan Mohr) The shortest mathematic joke: BEGIN -->"Epsilon less than zero"<-- END M__________________________________________________________________________ The law of the excluded middle either rules or does not rule, O.K.? M__________________________________________________________________________ Is the square root of ab absurd? M__________________________________________________________________________ Algebra is x-sighting. Vectors can be 'arrowing. I'm partial to fractions. I like angles ... to a degree. I could go on and on about sequences. Translations are shifty. Complex numbers are unreal. I feel positive about integers. On average, people are mean. M__________________________________________________________________________ From: c1prasad@watson.ibm.com (prasad) Klein bottle for rent -- inquire within. M__________________________________________________________________________ From: jusinkko@mail.freenet.hut.fi (jukka sinkko) In the topologic hell the beer is packed in Klein's bottles. M__________________________________________________________________________ Why did the chicken cross the road? Pierre de Fermat: I just don't have room here to give the full explanation. M__________________________________________________________________________ From:mstueben@pen.k12.va.us (Michael A. Stueben) Puns on Theorems The Royal Chain Mail Factory had received a large order for battle uniforms. Each uniform consisted of a toga and a pair of short pants. Their only problem was how long to make the pants: too short and a soldier could be exposed; too long and a uniform would be excessively heavy. So they called in a mathematician. He had a uniform made and tested. The hem on the pants proved to be too short, so he increased it a little bit, then a little more, and then a little bit more, and so on until finally he was able to derive an exact trousers-length depending on the leg-length of the soldier. The chief tailor was curious. "How did you determine this ratio?" he asked? "Easy," said the mathematician. "I just used the Wire-trousers Hem Test of Uniform Convergence." This is a pun on the "Weierstrauss M-test of uniform convergence," where M[k] is a convergent series of positive real numbers. (It was sent to me by Andrius Tamulis.) I wonder why M and not, say, N (numeric) or S (sum). M stands for . . .? From: bdillon@admin.aurora.edu (Bob Dillon) The following is from the January 23, 1995 issue of Chemical and Engineering News. Story Problems Portray Gains in Teaching Math M__________________________________________________________________________ From: joeshmoe@world.std.com (Jascha Franklin-Hodge) (List of Taglines) Math is the language God used to write the universe. M__________________________________________________________________________ If God is perfect, why did He create discontinuous functions? M__________________________________________________________________________ From: mstueben@pen.k12.va.us (Michael A. Stueben) THIRTEEN MISUNDERSTANDINGS IN THE HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS In the interest of historical accuracy let it be known that ... 1) Fibonacci's daughter was not named "Bunny." 2) Michael Rolle was not Danish, and did not call his daughter "Tootsie." 3) William Horner was not called "Little-Jack" by his friends. 4) The "G" in G. Peano does not stand for "grand." 5) Rene Descartes' middle name is not "push." 6) Isaac Barrow's middle name is not "wheel." 7) There is no such place as the University of Wis-cosine, and if there was, the motto of their mathematics department would not be "Secant ye shall find." 8) Although Euler is pronounced oil-er, it does not follow that Euclid is pronounced oi-clid. 9) Franklin D. Roosevelt never said "The only thing we have to sphere is sphere itself." 10) Fibonacci is not a shortened form of the Italian name that is actually spelled: F i bb ooo nnnnn aaaaaaaa cccccccccccc iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii. 11) It is true that August Mobius was a difficult and opinionated man. But he was not so rigid that he could only see one side to every question. 12) It is true that Johannes Kepler had an uphill struggle in explaining his theory of elliptical orbits to the other astronomers of his time. And it is also true that his first attempt was a failure. But it is not true that after his lecture the first three questions he was asked were "What is elliptical?" What is an orbit?" and "What is a planet? 13) It is true that primitive societies use only rough approximations for the known constants of mathematics. For example, the northern tribes of Alaska consider the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle to be 3. But it is not true that the value of 3 is called Eskimo pi. Incidentally, the survival of these tribes is dependent upon government assistance, which is not always forthcoming. For example, the Canadian firm of Tait and Sons sold a stock of defective compasses to the government at half-price, and the government passed them onto the northern natives. Hence the saying among these peoples: "He who has a Tait's is lost." M__________________________________________________________________________ The History of 2 + 2 = 5 by Houston Euler "First and above all he was a logician. At least thirty-five years of the half-century or so of his existence had been devoted exclusively to proving that two and two always equal four, except in unusual cases, where they equal three or five, as the case may be." -- Jacques Futrelle, "The Problem of Cell 13" Most mathematicians are familiar with -- or have at least seen references in the literature to -- the equation 2 + 2 = 4. However, the less well known equation 2 + 2 = 5 also has a rich, complex history behind it. Like any other complex quantitiy, this history has a real part and an imaginary part; we shall deal exclusively with the latter here. Many cultures, in their early mathematical development, discovered the equation 2 + 2 = 5. For example, consider the Bolb tribe, descended from the Incas of South America. The Bolbs counted by tying knots in ropes. They quickly realized that when a 2-knot rope is put together with another 2-knot rope, a 5-knot rope results. Recent findings indicate that the Pythagorean Brotherhood discovered a proof that 2 + 2 = 5, but the proof never got written up. Contrary to what one might expect, the proof's nonappearance was not caused by a cover-up such as the Pythagoreans attempted with the irrationality of the square root of two. Rather, they simply could not pay for the necessary scribe service. They had lost their grant money due to the protests of an oxen-rights activist who objected to the Brotherhood's method of celebrating the discovery of theorems. Thus it was that only the equation 2 + 2 = 4 was used in Euclid's "Elements," and nothing more was heard of 2 + 2 = 5 for several centuries. Around A.D. 1200 Leonardo of Pisa (Fibonacci) discovered that a few weeks after putting 2 male rabbits plus 2 female rabbits in the same cage, he ended up with considerably more than 4 rabbits. Fearing that too strong a challenge to the value 4 given in Euclid would meet with opposition, Leonardo conservatively stated, "2 + 2 is more like 5 than 4." Even this cautious rendition of his data was roundly condemned and earned Leonardo the nickname "Blockhead." By the way, his practice of underestimating the number of rabbits persisted; his celebrated model of rabbit populations had each birth consisting of only two babies, a gross underestimate if ever there was one. Some 400 years later, the thread was picked up once more, this time by the French mathematicians. Descartes announced, "I think 2 + 2 = 5; therefore it does." However, others objected that his argument was somewhat less than totally rigorous. Apparently, Fermat had a more rigorous proof which was to appear as part of a book, but it and other material were cut by the editor so that the book could be printed with wider margins. Between the fact that no definitive proof of 2 + 2 = 5 was available and the excitement of the development of calculus, by 1700 mathematicians had again lost interest in the equation. In fact, the only known 18th-century reference to 2 + 2 = 5 is due to the philosopher Bishop Berkeley who, upon discovering it in an old manuscript, wryly commented, "Well, now I know where all the departed quantities went to -- the right-hand side of this equation." That witticism so impressed California intellectuals that they named a university town after him. But in the early to middle 1800's, 2 + 2 began to take on great significance. Riemann developed an arithmetic in which 2 + 2 = 5, paralleling the Euclidean 2 + 2 = 4 arithmetic. Moreover, during this period Gauss produced an arithmetic in which 2 + 2 = 3. Naturally, there ensued decades of great confusion as to the actual value of 2 + 2. Because of changing opinions on this topic, Kempe's proof in 1880 of the 4-color theorem was deemed 11 years later to yield, instead, the 5-color theorem. Dedekind entered the debate with an article entitled "Was ist und was soll 2 + 2?" Frege thought he had settled the question while preparing a condensed version of his "Begriffsschrift." This condensation, entitled "Die Kleine Begriffsschrift (The Short Schrift)," contained what he considered to be a definitive proof of 2 + 2 = 5. But then Frege received a letter from Bertrand Russell, reminding him that in "Grundbeefen der Mathematik" Frege had proved that 2 + 2 = 4. This contradiction so discouraged Frege that he abandoned mathematics altogether and went into university administration. Faced with this profound and bewildering foundational question of the value of 2 + 2, mathematicians followed the reasonable course of action: they just ignored the whole thing. And so everyone reverted to 2 + 2 = 4 with nothing being done with its rival equation during the 20th century. There had been rumors that Bourbaki was planning to devote a volume to 2 + 2 = 5 (the first forty pages taken up by the symbolic expression for the number five), but those rumor remained unconfirmed. Recently, though, there have been reported computer-assisted proofs that 2 + 2 = 5, typically involving computers belonging to utility companies. Perhaps the 21st century will see yet another revival of this historic equation. M__________________________________________________________________________ From: kfoster@rainbow.rmii.com (Kurt Foster) First mathemetician: I know this is a group, but it's hard to study. Second mathematician: Well, I can prove it's commutative. First mathematician: Thanks abelian! *M_________________________________________________________________________ From: rrcraig@eos.ncsu.edu (Ralph Ray Craig) Q: How many numerical analysts does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: 0.9973 after the first three iterations. *M_________________________________________________________________________ From: immortal@wam.umd.edu (Immortal = Justin Wyss-Gallifent) Q: Why can't you grow wheat in Z/6Z ? A: Because it's not a field. *M_________________________________________________________________________ From: kovarik@mcmail.cis.mcmaster.ca (Zdislav V. Kovarik) A retired mathematician took up gardening, and is now growing carrots with square roots. *M_________________________________________________________________________ From: kovarik@mcmail.cis.mcmaster.ca (Zdislav V. Kovarik) (From a cartoon by J. Effel): In the Garden of Eden, God is giving Adam a geometry lesson: "Two parallel lines intersect at infinity. It can't be proved but I've been there." *M_________________________________________________________________________ From: wft@math.canterbury.ac.nz (Bill Taylor) Some say the pope is the greatest cardinal. But others insist this cannot be so, as every pope has a successor. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ =2.1 PROOFS PROOFS THAT P (attributed to Hartry Field) Davidson's proof that p: Let us make the following bold conjecture: p Wallace's proof that p: Davidson has made the following bold conjecture: p Grunbaum: As I have asserted again and again in previous publications, p. Morgenbesser: If not p, what? q maybe? Putnam: Some philosophers have argued that not-p, on the grounds that q. It would be an interesting exercise to count all the fallacies in this "argument". (It's really awful, isn't it?) Therefore p. Rawls: It would be a nice to have a deductive argument that p from self-evident premises. Unfortunately, I am unable to provide one. So I will have to rest content with the following intuitive considerations in its support: p. Unger: Suppose it were the case that not-p. It would follow from this that someone knows that q. But on my view, no one knows anything whatsoever. Therefore p. (Unger beieves that the louder you say this argument the more persuasive it becomes.) Katz: I have seventeen arguments for the claim that p, and I know of only four for the claim that not-p. Therefore p. Lewis: Most people find the claim that not p completely obvious and when I assert p they give me an incredulous stare. But the fact that they find not-p obvious is no argument that it is true; and I do not know how to refute an incredulous stare. Therefore p. Fodor: My argument for p is based on three premises: (1) q (2) r and (3) p >From these, the claim that p deductively follows. Some people may find the third premise controversial, but it is clear that if we replaced that premise by any other reasonable premise, the argument would go through just as well. Sellars's proof that p: Unfortunately, limitations of space prevent it from being included here, but important parts of the proof can be found in each of the articles in the attached bibliography. Earman: There are solutions to the field equations of general relativity in which space-time has the structure of a four-dimensional klein bottle and in which there is no matter. In each such space-time, the claim that not-p is false. Therefore p. Kripke: OUTLINE OF A "PROOF" THAT P [footnote] Saul Kripke Some philosophers have argued that not-p. But none of them seems to me to have made a convincing argument against the intuitive view that this is not the case. Therefore, p. [footnote]. This outline was prepared hastily--at the editor's insistence---from a taped transcript of a lecture. Since I was not even given the opportunity to revise the first draft before publication, I cannot be held responsible for any lacunae in the (published version of the) argument, or for any fallacious or garbled inferences resulting from faulty preparation of the typescript. Also, the argument now seems to me to have problems which I did not know when I wrote it, but which I can't discuss here, and which are completely unrelated to any criticisms that have appeared in the literature (or that I have seen in manuscript); all such criticisms misconstrue the argument. It will be noted that the present version of the argument seems to presuppose the (intuitionistically unacceptable) law of double negation. But the argument can easily be reformulated in a way that avoids employing such an inference rule. I hope to expand on these matters further in a separate monograph. Routley and Meyer: If (q & not-q) is true, then there is a model for p. Therefore p. M__________________________________________________________________________ From: Benjamin.J.Tilly@dartmouth.edu (Benjamin J. Tilly) Theorem : All numbers are equal to zero. Proof: Suppose that a=b. Then a = b a^2 = ab a^2 - b^2 = ab - b^2 (a + b)(a - b) = b(a - b) a + b = b a = 0 M__________________________________________________________________________ From: Michael_Ketzlick@h2.maus.de (Michael Ketzlick) Theorem : 3=4 Proof: Suppose: a + b = c This can also be written as: 4a - 3a + 4b - 3b = 4c - 3c After reorganising: 4a + 4b - 4c = 3a + 3b - 3c Take the constants out of the brackets: 4 * (a+b-c) = 3 * (a+b-c) Remove the same term left and right: 4 = 3 M__________________________________________________________________________ From: Benjamin.J.Tilly@dartmouth.edu (Benjamin J. Tilly) Theorem: 1$ = 1c. Proof: And another that gives you a sense of money disappearing... 1$ = 100c = (10c)^2 = (0.1$)^2 = 0.01$ = 1c Here $ means dollars and c means cents. This one is scary in that I have seen PhD's in math who were unable to see what was wrong with this one. Actually I am crossposting this to sci.physics because I think that the latter makes a very nice introduction to the importance of keeping track of your dimensions... M__________________________________________________________________________ From: clubok@physics11 (Kenneth S. Clubok) Theorem: 1 = -1 . Proof: 1 -1 -- = -- -1 1 1 -1 sqrt[ -- ] = sqrt[ -- ] -1 1 sqrt[1] sqrt[-1] ------- = ------- sqrt[-1] sqrt[1] 1=-1 (by cross-multiplication) And here's my personal favorite: Use integration by parts to find the anti-derivative of 1/x. One can get the amusing result that 0=1. (Until you realize you have to put in the limits.) M__________________________________________________________________________ From: jreimer@aol.com (JReimer) Theorem: 1 = -1 Proof: 1 = sqrt(1) = sqrt(-1 * -1) = sqrt(-1) * sqrt(-1) = 1^ = -1 Also one can disprove the axiom that things equal to the same thing are equal to each other. 1 = sqrt(1) -1 = sqrt(1) therefore 1 = -1 M__________________________________________________________________________ From: kdq@marsupial.jpl.nasa.gov (Kevin D. Quitt) Theorem: 4 = 5 Proof: 16 - 36 = 25 - 45 4^2 - 9*4 = 5^2 - 9*5 4^2 - 9*4 + 81/4 = 5^2 - 9*5 + 81/4 (4 - 9/2)^2 = (5 - 9/2)^2 4 - 9/2 = 5 - 9/2 4 = 5 M__________________________________________________________________________ baez@guitar.ucr.edu (john baez) writes: Theorem: 1 + 1 = 2 Proof: n(2n - 2) = n(2n - 2) n(2n - 2) - n(2n - 2) = 0 (n - n)(2n - 2) = 0 2n(n - n) - 2(n - n) = 0 2n - 2 = 0 2n = 2 n + n = 2 or setting n = 1 1 + 1 = 2 M__________________________________________________________________________ From: magidin@uclink.berkeley.edu (Arturo Viso Magidin) Theorem: In any finite set of women, if one has blue eyes then they all have blue eyes. Proof. Induction on the number of elements. if n= or n=1 it is immediate. Assume it is true for k Consider a group with k+1 women, and without loss of generality assume the first one has blue eyes. I will represent one with blue eyes with a '*' and one with unknown eye color as @. You have the set of women: {*,@,...,@} with k+1 elements. Consider the subset made up of the first k. This subset is a set of k women, of which one has blue eyes. By the induction hypothesis, all of them have blue eyes. We have then: {*,...,*,@}, with k+1 elements. Now consider the subset of the last k women. This is a set of k women, of which one has blue eyes (the next-to-last element of the set), hence they all have blue eyes, in particular the k+1-th woman has blue eyes. Hence all k+1 women have blue eyes. By induction, it follows that in any finite set of women, if one has blue eyes they all have blue eyes. QED M__________________________________________________________________________ From: Zorro Theorem: All positive integers are interesting. Proof: Assume the contrary. Then there is a lowest non-interesting positive integer. But, hey, that's pretty interesting! A contradiction. QED I heard this one from G. B. Thomas, but I don't know whether it is due to him. M__________________________________________________________________________ From: daniel@hagar.ph.utexas.edu (James Daniel) Aren't multi-valued functions fun? Once you realize what's going on, though, you can make them into silly proofs pretty much without thinking. Here's one I just made up: Object: to prove that i < 0 ( that is, sqrt(-1) < 0 ) Well, ( .5 + sqrt(3/4)*i )^3 = (-1)^3 (most would assert this to be a false statement -- mostly cuz they'll get the math wrong. It's a true statement. It's the next statement that is false.) which means that .5 + sqrt(3/4)*i = -1 So then 1 + sqrt(3)*i = -2 sqrt(3)*i = -1 i = -1/sqrt(3) Therefore i is a negative number. QED. M__________________________________________________________________________ From: julison@cco.caltech.edu (Julian C. Jamison) Theorem: All numbers are equal. Proof: Choose arbitrary a and b, and let t = a + b. Then a + b = t (a + b)(a - b) = t(a - b) a^2 - b^2 = ta - tb a^2 - ta = b^2 - tb a^2 - ta + (t^2)/4 = b^2 - tb + (t^2)/4 (a - t/2)^2 = (b - t/2)^2 a - t/2 = b - t/2 a = b So all numbers are the same, and math is pointless. M__________________________________________________________________________ From: pfc@math.ufl.edu (P. Fritz Cronheim) This one is from Jerry King's _Art of Mathematics_ 16/64=1/4 by cancelling the 6's. Here the result is true, but the method is not. Do the ends justify the means? :)_ M__________________________________________________________________________ Methods of Mathematical Proof This is from _A Random Walk in Science_ (by Joel E. Cohen?): To illustrate the various methods of proof we give an example of a logical system. THE PEJORATIVE CALCULUS Theorem 2. Alexander the Great did not exist and he had an infinite number of limbs. Proof. We prove this theorem in two parts. First we note the obvious fact that historians always tell the truth (for historians always take a stand, and therefore they cannot lie). Hence we have the historically true sentence, 'If Alexander the Great existed, then he rode a black horse Bucephalus.' But we know by corollary 2 everything is white; hence Alexander could not have ridden a black horse. Since the conse- quent of the conditional is false, in order for the whole statement to be true the antecedent must be false. Hence Alexander the Great did not exist. We have also the historically true statement that Alexander was warned by an oracle that he would meet death if he crossed a certain river. He had two legs; and 'forewarned is four-armed.' This gives him six limbs, an even number, which is certainly an odd number of limbs for a man. Now the only number which is even and odd is infinity; hence Alexander had an infinite number of limbs. We have thus proved that Alexander the Great did not exist and that he had an infinite number of limbs. M__________________________________________________________________________ Theorem: a cat has nine tails. Proof: No cat has eight tails. A cat has one tail more than no cat. Therefore, a cat has nine tails. M__________________________________________________________________________ From: rmaimon@husc9.Harvard.EDU (Ron Maimon) Theorem: All dogs have nine legs. Proof: would you agree that no dog has five legs? would you agree that _a_ dog has four legs more then _no_ dog? 4 + 5 = ? ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ =2.2 STATISTICS AND STATISTICANS M__________________________________________________________________________ Did you hear the one about the statistician? Probably.... M__________________________________________________________________________ Statistics means never having to say you're certain. [With apologies to Erich Segal] M__________________________________________________________________________ In earlier times, they had no statistics, and so they had to fall back on lies. - STEPHEN LEACOCK M__________________________________________________________________________ "The group was alarmed to find that if you are a labourer, cleaner or dock worker, you are twice as likely to die than a member of the professional classes" [The Sunday Times 31st August 1980] M__________________________________________________________________________ From: ph2008@mail.bris.ac.uk (CJ. Bradfield) Statistics is the art of never having to say you're wrong. Variance is what any two staticticians are at. (Not that I particularly dislike statisticians... I hate all mathematicians!!) [sorry mum!] M__________________________________________________________________________ 97.3% of all statistics are made up. M__________________________________________________________________________ it's like the tale of the roadside merchant who was asked to explain how he could sell rabbit sandwiches so cheap. "Well" he explained, "I have to put some horse-meat in too. But I mix them 50:50. One horse, one rabbit." [DARREL HUFF, How to lie with statistics] M__________________________________________________________________________ Are statisticians normal? M__________________________________________________________________________ From: joeshmoe@world.std.com (Jascha Franklin-Hodge) (List of Taglines) Smoking is a leading cause of statistics. I could prove God statistically. 43% of all statistics are worthless. "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics." -Mark Twain 3 out of 4 Americans make up 75% of the population. Death is 99 per cent fatal to laboratory rats. M__________________________________________________________________________ Did you know that the great majority of people have more than the average number of legs? [It's obvious really; amongst the 57 million people in Britain there are probably 5,000 people who have only got one leg. Therefore the average number of legs is (5000 * 1) + (56,995,000 * 2) ---------------------------------- = 1.9999123...... 57,000,000 Since most people have 2 legs....... ] M__________________________________________________________________________ A statistician is a person who draws a mathematically precise line from an unwarranted asumption to a foregone conclusion. M__________________________________________________________________________ A statistician can have his head in an oven and his feet in ice, and he will say that on the average he feels fine. M__________________________________________________________________________ From: Chris Morton (mortoncp@nextwork.rose-hulman.edu) do it collection Statisticians do it continuously but discretely. Statisticians do it when it counts. Statisticians do it with 95% confidence. Statisticians do it with large numbers. Statisticians do it with only a 5% chance of being rejected. Statisticians do it with two-tail T tests. Statisticians do it. After all, it's only normal. Statisticians probably do it. M__________________________________________________________________________ From: Mathematics Magazine, December 1990. Subject: Statisticians ( Excerpted from "Quotes, Damned Quotes" by John Bibby ) If there is a 50-50 chance that something can go wrong, then 9 times out of ten it will. (Paul Harvey News, 1979) ``Give us a copper Guv'' said the beggar to the Treasury statistician, when he waylaid him in Parliament square. ``I haven't eaten for three days.'' ``Ah,'' said the statistician, ``and how does that compare with the same period last year?'' (Russell Lewis) ``I gather, young man, that you wish to be a Member of Parliament. The first lesson that you must learn is, when I call for statistics about the rate of infant mortality, what I want is proof that fewer babies died when I was Prime Minister than when anyone else was Prime Minister. That is a political statistic.'' (Winston Churchill) ``You haven't told me yet,'' said Lady Nuttal, ``what it is your fiance does for a living.'' ``He's a statistician,'' replied Lamia, with an annoying sense of being on the defensive. Lady Nuttal was obviously taken aback. It had not occurred to her that statisticians entered into normal social relationships. The species, she would have surmised, was perpetuated in some collateral manner, like mules. ``But Aunt Sara, it's a very interesting profession,'' said Lamia warmly. ``I don't doubt it,'' said her aunt, who obviously doubted it very much. ``To express anything important in mere figures is so plainly impossible that there must be endless scope for well-paid advice on the how to do it. But don't you think that life with a statistician would be rather, shall we say, humdrum?'' Lamia was silent. She felt reluctant to discuss the surprising depth of emotional possibility which she had discovered below Edward's numerical veneer. ``It's not the figures themselves,'' she said finally. ``It's what you do with them that matters.'' (K.A.C. Manderville, The undoing of Lamia Gurdleneck) M__________________________________________________________________________ People who do very unusual jobs: the man who counts then number of people at public gatherings. You've probably seen his headlines, "Two million flock to see Pope.", "200 arrested as police find ounce of cannabis.", "Britain #3 billion in debt". You probably wondered who was responsible for producing such well rounded-up figures. What you didn't know was that it was all the work of one man, Rounder-Up to the media, John Wheeler. But how is he able to go on turning out such spot-on statistics? How can he be so accurate all the time? "We can't" admits Wheeler blithely. "Frankly, after the first million we stop counting, and round it up to the next million. I don't know if you've ever counted a papal flock, but, not only do they look a bit the same, they also don't keep still, what with all the bowing and crossing themselves." "The only way you could do it accurately is by taking an aerial photograph of the crowd and handing it to the computer to work out. But then you'd get a headline saying "1,678,163 [sic] flock to see Pope, not including 35,467 who couldn't see him", and, believe me, nobody wants that sort of headline." The art of big figures, avers Wheeler, lies in psychology, not statistics. The public like a figure it can admire. It likes millionaires, and million-sellers, and centuries at cricket, so Wheeler's international agency gives them the figures it wants, which involves not only rounding up but rounding down. "In the old days people used to deal with crowds on the Isle of Wight principle -- you know, they'd say that every day the population of the world increased by the number of people who could stand upright on the Isle of Wight, or the rain-forests were being decreased by an area the size of Rutland. This meant nothing. Most people had never been to the Isle of Wight for a start, and even if they had, they only had a vision of lots of Chinese standing in the grounds of the Cowes Yacht Club. And the Rutland comparison was so useless that they were driven to abolish Rutland to get rid of it. "No, what people want is a few good millions. A hundred million, if possible. One of our inventions was street value, for instance. In the old days they used to say that police had discovered drugs in a quantity large enough to get all of Rutland stoned for a fortnight. *We* started saying that the drugs had a street value of #10 million. Absolutely meaningless, but people understand it better." Sometimes they do get the figures spot on. "250,000 flock to see Royal two", was one of his recent headlines, and although the 250,000 was a rounded-up figure, the two was quite correct. in his palatial office he sits surrounded by relics of past headlines - a million-year-old fossil, a #500,000 Manet, a photograph of the Sultan of Brunei's #10,000,000 house - but pride of place goes to a pair of shoes framed on the wall. "Why the shoes? Because they cost me #39.99. They serve as a reminder of mankind's other great urge, to have stupid odd figures. Strange, isn't it? They want mass demos of exactly half a million, but they also want their gramophone records to go round at thirty-three-and-a-third, forty-five and seventy-eight rpm. We have stayed in business by remembering that below a certain level people want oddity. They don't a rocket costing #299 million and 99p, and they don't want a radio costing exactly #50." How does he explain the times when the figures clash - when, for example, the organisers of a demo claim 250,000 but the police put it nearer 100,000? "We provide both sets of figures; the figures the organisers want, and the figures the police want. The public believe both. If we gave the true figure, about 167,890, nobody would believe it because it doesn't sound believable." John Wheeler's name has never become well-known, as he is a shy figure, but his firm has an annual turnover of #3 million and his eye for the right figure has made him a rich man. His greatest pleasure, however, comes from the people he meets in the counting game. "Exactly two billion, to be precise." MILES KINGTON writing in The Observer, 3 November 1986 M__________________________________________________________________________ From: goble@infonaut.com (Clark Goble) You know how dumb the average guy is? Well, by definition, half of them are even dumber than that. -- J.R. "Bob" Dobbs *M_________________________________________________________________________ From: Kirk Lindberg (kalindberg@mmm.com) Q: What is the definition of a statistician? A: Someone who doesn't have the personality to be an accountant. *M_________________________________________________________________________ Did you hear about the Statistician that couldn't get laid? He decided a simulation was good enough. *M_________________________________________________________________________ From: rogers@sasuga.Hi.COM (Andrew Rogers) "She was only the statistician's daughter, but she knew all the standard deviations." *M_________________________________________________________________________ From: en4bmhd@bs47c.staffs.ac.uk (Hendrik De Vloed) All probabilities are 50% ... either something happens, or it doesn't! From: brc2@Lehigh.EDU Correction... My doctor told me I only have a 50% chance of making it- but he said there's only a 15% of even that. *M_________________________________________________________________________ From: ahilditc@awadi.com.au & ts@uwasa.fi (Timo Salmi) & Juhani Heino A:I'll bet that 99% of people who read the question don't! T:That's a mean thing to say. J:Yes, it was. I guess that person is too regressed. As a matter of fact, I'm 75.4 % sure about that. T:Incidentally, did you know that using non-linear regression in research is currently out of line. *M________________________________________________________________________ From: jlevine@rd.hydro.on.ca (Jody Levine) 80% of all statistics quoted to prove a point are made up on the spot. *M________________________________________________________________________ From: Sunita Saini A stats major was completely hung over the day of his final exam. It was a True/False test, so he decided to flip a coin for the answers. The stats professor watched the student the entire two hours as he was flipping the coin...writing the answer...flipping the coin...writing the answer. At the end of the two hours, everyone else had left the final except for the one student. The professor walks up to his desk and interrupts the student, saying: "Listen, I have seen that you did not study for this statistics test, you didn't even open the exam. If you are just flipping a coin for your answer, what is taking you so long? The student replies bitterly (as he is still flipping the coin): " Shhh! I am checking my answers!" ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ =2.3 MATHEMATICIANS From: Hugh Robinson Okay, here's mine. I am told that it's true, but... A certain well-known pure mathematician had a wife who, while intelligent, was not into mathematics. However, by continued practice, she learnt to distinguish between the conversations of algebraists and analysts. So when he had guests to dinner who were talking about mathematics, if they were analysts, she would introduce at a suitable pause in the conversation: "But what happens at the boundary?" Whereas, if they were algebraists, she would say: "But do the roots lie in the field?" By this means she was always able to impress his visitors by her knowledge of mathematics. (No, don't write and ask for the punchline. That's all.) M__________________________________________________________________________ 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." M__________________________________________________________________________ Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) M__________________________________________________________________________ Old mathematicians never die; they just lose some of their functions. From: Tim.Nelson@Canada.ATTGIS.COM (list of Old * Never Die, they just) 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 M__________________________________________________________________________ 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. M__________________________________________________________________________ How many mathematicians does it take to screw in a lightbulb? One, who gives it to six Californians, thereby reducing it to an earlier riddle. -- from a button I bought at Nancy Lebowitz's table at Boskone Q: How many topologists does it take to change a light bulb? A: It really doesn't matter, since they'd rather knot. From:BRIAN6@VAXC.MDX.AC.UK (who has a lightbulb collection) Q: How many mathematicians does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: None. It's left to the reader as an exercise. A: Just one, once you've managed to present the problem in terms he/she is familiar with. In earlier work, Wiener [1] has shown that one mathematician can change a light bulb. If k mathematicians can change a light bulb, and if one more simply watches them do it, then k+1 mathematicians will have changed the light bulb. Therefore, by induction, for all n in the positive integers, n mathematicians can change a light bulb. Bibliography: [1] Weiner, Matthew P., <11485@ucbvax>, "Re: YALBJ", 1986 Q: How many statisticians does it take to change a lightbulb ? A: This should be determined using a nonparametric procedure, since statisticians are NOT NORMAL. A: Walt Pirie to hold the bulb and one psychologist, one economist, one sociologist and one anthroplogist to pull away the ladder. A: One -- plus or minus three (small sample size). (Notes: Someone has been asking this as a bonus question on statistics exam papers for quite a while. Judging from some of his own students' exam answers, it depends on whether the lightbulb is negatively or positively screwed.) Q: How many light bulbs does it take to change a light bulb? A: One, if it knows its own Goedel number. (Could somebody please explain this one to me ! I think it's something to do with the maths/logic theories of Kurt Goedel, about it being impossible to prove things.) M__________________________________________________________________________ "A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems" -- P. Erdos M__________________________________________________________________________ Moebius always does it on the same side. Statisticians probably do it Algebraists do it in groups. (Logicians do it) or [not (logicians do it)]. From: Chris Morton (mortoncp@nextwork.rose-hulman.edu) do it collection Logicians do it consistently and completely. Mathematicians do it associatively. Mathematicians do it commutatively. Mathematicians do it constantly. Mathematicians do it continuously. Mathematicians do it discretely. Mathematicians do it exponentially. Mathematicians do it forever if they can do one and can do one more. Mathematicians do it functionally. Mathematicians do it homologically. Mathematicians do it in fields. Mathematicians do it in groups. Mathematicians do it in imaginary planes. Mathematicians do it in numbers. Mathematicians do it in theory. Mathematicians do it on smooth contours. Mathematicians do it over and under the curves. Mathematicians do it parallel and perpendicular. Mathematicians do it partially. Mathematicians do it rationally. Mathematicians do it reflexively. Mathematicians do it symmetrically. Mathematicians do it to prove themselves. Mathematicians do it to their limits. Mathematicians do it totally. Mathematicians do it transcendentally. Mathematicians do it transitively. Mathematicians do it variably. Mathematicians do it with Nobel's wife. Mathematicians do it with a Minkowski sausage. Mathematicians do it with imaginary parts. Mathematicians do it with linear pairs. Mathematicians do it with odd functions. Mathematicians do it with prime roots. Mathematicians do it with relations. Mathematicians do it with rings. Mathematicians do it with their real parts. Mathematicians do it without limit. Mathematicians do over an open unmeasurable interval. Mathematicians have to prove they did it. Set theorists do it with cardinals. M__________________________________________________________________________ A mathematician is a person who says that, when 3 people are supposed to be in a room but 5 came out, 2 have to go in so the room gets empty... M__________________________________________________________________________ From: lyon@netcom.com (Lyman Lyon) Physics professor is walking across campus, runs into Math Professor. Physics professor has been doing an experiment, and has worked out an emphirical 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." M__________________________________________________________________________ From: gw@molly.informatik.Uni-Koeln.DE (Georg Wambach) What is the difference between an applied mathematician and a pure mathematician? Suppose a mathematician parks his car, locks it with his key and walks away. After walking about 50 yards the mathematician realizes that he has dropped his key somewhere along the way. What does he do? If he is an applied mathematician he walks back to the car along the path he has previously traveled looking for his key. If he is a pure mathematician he walks to the other end of the parking lot where there is better light and looks for his key there. I told this joke to my brother (he is a "pure"). He answers: "But we have not dropped our keys!" Hence, I suggest a slight modification: Suppose a _tax_payer_ parks his car, locks it with his key and walks away. After walking about 50 yards the tax payer realizes that he has dropped his key somewhere along the way. He asked a mathematician to help him. What does the mathematician do? (...) +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ =2.4 POETRY M__________________________________________________________________________ From: chrisman@ucdmath.ucdavis.edu (Mark Chrisman) "Aleph-0 bottles of beer on the wall, Aleph-0 bottles of beer; Take one down, pass it around, Aleph-0 bottles of beer on the wall! Aleph-0 bottles of beer on the wall..." M__________________________________________________________________________ One and one make two, But if one and one should marry, Isn't it queer- Within a year There's two and one to carry. M__________________________________________________________________________ Geometry keeps you in shape. Decimals make a point. Einstein was ahead of his time. Lobachevski was out of line. M__________________________________________________________________________ "IF" (School Maths version) =========================== 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. [Times Educational Supplement 19th July 1947] M__________________________________________________________________________ This poem was written by Jon Saxton (an author of math textbooks). ((12 + 144 + 20 + (3 * 4^(1/2))) / 7) + (5 * 11) = 9^2 + 0 Or for those who have trouble with the poem: A Dozen, a Gross and a Score, plus three times the square root of four, divided by seven, plus five times eleven, equals nine squared and not a bit more. M__________________________________________________________________________ '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. ("The Lure of the Limerick" by W.S. Baring-Gould, p.5. Attributed to Harvey L. Carter). M__________________________________________________________________________ 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 M__________________________________________________________________________ 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... M__________________________________________________________________________ Not a joke, but a humorous ditty I heard from some guys in an engineering fraternity (to the best of my recollection): I'll do it phonetically: ee to the ex dee ex, ee to the why dee why, sine x, cosine x, natural log of y, derivative on the left derivative on the right integrate, integrate, fight! fight! fight! M__________________________________________________________________________ Other cheers: E to the x dx dy radical transcendental pi secant cosine tangent sine 3.14159 2.71828 come on folks let's integrate!! M__________________________________________________________________________ E to the i dx dy E to y dy cosine secant log of pi disintegrate em RPI !!! M__________________________________________________________________________ square root, tangent hyperbolic sine, 3.14159 e to the x, dy, dx, sliderule, slipstick, TECH TECH TECH! M__________________________________________________________________________ e to the u, du/dx e to the x dx cosine, secant, tangent, sine, 3.14159 integral, radical, u dv, slipstick, slide rule, MIT! M__________________________________________________________________________ E to the X D-Y, D-X E to the X D-X. Cosine, Secant, Tangent, Sine 3.14159 E-I, Radical, Pi Fight'em, Fight'em, WPI! Go Worcester Polytechnic Institute!!!!!! M__________________________________________________________________________ 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." M__________________________________________________________________________ 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. -- Paul Chernoff M__________________________________________________________________________ _There Once Was a Breathy Baboon_ by Sir Arthur Eddington There once was a breathy baboon Who always breathed down a bassoon, For he said, "It appears That in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune." +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ =2.5 QUOTES M__________________________________________________________________________ From: ph2008@mail.bris.ac.uk (CJ. Bradfield)philosophy: A few of my favourite quotes about mathematics: "A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there" - Charles Darwin M__________________________________________________________________________ "A person who can, within a year, solve x^2 - 92y^2 = 1 is a mathematician." -- Brahmagupta M__________________________________________________________________________ Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house. -- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love" M__________________________________________________________________________ Sex is the mathematics urge sublimated. -- M. C. Reed. M__________________________________________________________________________ "The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell." -- St. Augustine P.S. Augustine did really say that, but in his time there was no difference between mathematicans and astrologists. Astrologists told the future, which was diabolic. M__________________________________________________________________________ As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. -- Albert Einstein M__________________________________________________________________________ Mathematics contains much that will neither hurt one if one does not know it nor help one if one does know it. - J.B. Mencken +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ =3. PHYSICS MP_________________________________________________________________________ From: shhong@chiak.kaist.ac.kr (Hong Seongho) Theoretical Physics is a science locally isomorphic to Mathematics. P__________________________________________________________________________ On the heater lies a tile. The teacher asks: "Why does the the tile warmer at the side that lies at the far side of the heater?". The student stammers :"Eh, maybe because of the heat conduction and so?" Teacher: "No, because I just turned it around." P__________________________________________________________________________ benker@cae.wisc.edu Two atoms were walking down the street. One turns to the other and says, "Oh, no! I think I'm an ion!" The other responds, "Are you sure?!?" "Yes, I'm positive!" P__________________________________________________________________________ From: dsmillie@superior.carleton.ca (David Smillie) Two sodium atoms are flying around a cyclotron. Suddenly the first atom said to the second, `Hey, I think I've just lost an electron.' `Are you sure?' asked the second atom. `Yeah,' said the first, `I'm positive.' Of course, the _real_ joke is that neither sodium atom could have been flying around the cyclotron in the first place, unless they were _already_ ionized. (collapses to the floor, gasping for breath and chuckling hysterically while everyone else in the room edges nervously away) P__________________________________________________________________________ From: harper@kauri.vuw.ac.nz (John Harper) every couple has its moment, especially P__________________________________________________________________________ From: zdxc0d@amoco.com (David Crowson) Physicists at Harwell have discovered the heaviest element known to science, named Administratum. The new element has no protons or electrons, and has an atomic number of zero. However, it does have one neutron, eight assistant neutrons, ten executive neutrons, 35 vice neutrons and 258 assistant vice neutrons. Administratum has an atomic mass of 311=, since the neutron is only detectable half of the time. Its 312 particles are held together by a force which involves the continuous exchange of meson-like particles, called morons. Since it has no electrons, Administratum is completely inert. Nevertheless, its presence can be detected because it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. One experiment, which should have lasted only a few days, is still running after 2= years due to the addition of just one milligramme of Administratum. It is weakly active, and has a normal half-life of approximately six months. After this time, it does not actually decay, but undergoes a metamorphosis in which assistant neutrons, executive neutrons, vice neutrons and assistant vice neutrons exchange places. This almost invariably leads to an increase in atomic weight, hence it is self-sustaining. Although it occurs widely, Administratum tends to concentrate around large corporations, research laboratories and government departments. It can especially be found in recently re-organised sites, and there is reason to believe that it is heavily involved in the processes of deforestation and global warming. It should be remembered that Administratum is known to be toxic at all concentrations, and can easily destroy any productive reactions where it is allowed to accumulate. Numerous attempts have been made to determine how Administratum can be controlled to prevent irreversible damage, but results to date are not promising. From: tornberg@netcom.com (Neal E. Tornberg) Research at other laboratories indicates that Administratium occurs naturally in the atmosphere. It tends to concentrate at certain points such as government agencies, large corporations and universities and can usually be found in the newest, best appointed and best maintained buildings. From: Benjamin.J.Tilly@dartmouth.edu (Benjamin J. Tilly) One major problem is that proximity to this substance tends to make the process of getting anything done (such as getting grant money) more time-consuming, which makes the experiments in question extremely time-consuming. P__________________________________________________________________________ Ivan Ivanovich, great russian Scientist does an experiment. He wants to know how fast a thermometer falls down. He takes a thermometer and a light, a candle light. He drops both from the 3rd floor and recognices that they are reaching the ground at the same time. Ivan Ivanovich, great russian scientific writes in his book: A theomometer falls with the speed of light. P__________________________________________________________________________ dasher@netcom.com (Anton Sherwood) writes: Somewhere there must be a list of ways to measure the height of a building. A student is sitting his Physics exam, and quite an important one at that---maybe his final degree paper or his Oxford Entrance. Anyway, one of the questions on the paper was to the effect of: ``Q: How could one measure the height of a building using a barometer?'' Being a wit, in the exam this chap puts: ``A: Drop the barometer from the top of the building and time its descent. Using the formula `s = ut + a(t^2)/2' and knowing `a' which is `g' we can calculate the height of the building with reasonable accuracy.'' He then goes on to describe in more detail the method he would use. The examiners were a little concerned. Here was one of their star students giving an answer they hadn't at all expected. So they decided to call him in and give him an oral test to decide whether or not to allow the answer which they did admit was perfectly valid. So they called him in and told him he had 15 minutes to make his case. For ten minutes he said nothing but scribbled away furiously. After these ten minutes the atmosphere was getting a little tense---this was meant to be an oral after all, and his degree (or whatever) depended on it. When they pointed this out to him he said that he was just trying to get his thoughts in order as there were so many possible solutions. Here are some of the ones he came up with: ``1: What you wanted me to do, of course, was measure air pressure at the top and bottom of the building, and from the difference and knowing the pressure exerted by a column of air of unit height I should be able to calculate the height of the building. But I thought that would be terribly inaccurate and the answer I gave in the exam and the following ones are all potentially more accurate. 2: Measure the length of shadow cast by the bulding and by the barometer on a sunny day. Knowing the actual height of the barometer one can compute the height of the building. 3: Tie the barometer to the end of a long bit of string and lower the barometer from the top of the building to the ground. Measure the amount of string payed out and you have the height of the building.'' He then gave several more but ended with: ``The best method by far, though, would be to go to the building's janitor and say `If I give you this shiny new scientific barometer will you tell me how high this building is?' '' The student passed his exam. P__________________________________________________________________________ From: Phil Gustafson The just-released book, "Expert C Programming (Deep C Secrets)", Peter van der Linden, SunSoft/Prentice-Hall, ISBN 0-13-177429-8, lists twenty-one (21) more or less useful ways to measure the height of a building with a barometer. (10) Use the barometer as a paperweight while examining the building plans. From: gt4495c@prism.gatech.edu (Giannhs) Use a barometer to reflect a laser beam from the top and measure the travel time. Track the shadow of the building posisioning a barometer on the ground every hour. Create an explosion on the top and measure the time for the pressure depression indicated on the barometer. From: peter@cara.demon.co.uk (Peter Ceresole) I think it would be simpler to let down a lightly weighted fishing line, mark it, reel it back and measure it at leisure. For fun, how about using sound; fire a starting pistol at the bottom, time the difference of arrival at the top. About a second for the Empire State building, and of course it'd have to be a damn great gun to carry over the howl and screech of downtown Gotham. Also, the detonation might get confused with the sounds of routine crack dealing below. Micro Farad, attracted by Millie's characteristic curve, soon had her field fully excited. He laid her on the ground potential, raised her frequency, lowered her resistance, and pulled out his high voltage probe. He inserted it in parallel and began to short circuit her shunt. Fully excited, Millie cried out, "ohm, ohm, give me mho". With his tube at maximum output and her coil vibrating from the current flow, her shunt soon reached maximum heat. The excessive current had shorted her shunt, and Micro's capacity was rapidly discharged, and every electron was drained off. They fluxed all night, tried various connections and hookings until his bar magnet had lost all of its strength, and he could no longer generate enough voltage to sustain his collapsing field. With his battery fully discharged, Micro was unable to excite his tickler, so they ended up reversing polarity and blowing each other's fuses. P__________________________________________________________________________ From: Marcel Melters THE SEX LIFE OF AN ELECTRON ( with happy ending) One night when his charge was pretty high, Micro Farad went to see if he could find a cute little coil to let him discharge. He picked up Milli Amp, and took her for a ride on his Megacycle. They rode accross the wheatstone bridge, along the sine wave and stopped at a magnetic field flowing with current. Micro Farad soon had her resistance at a minimum level. They laid against ground level. Micro Farad then inserted his probe in Milli Amps socket. Mho, Mho, give me Mho, she said. They fluxed all night, trying out various connections. Afterwards Milli Amp tried self-induction and damaged her probe. After this, they went home and oscillated happily ever after. P__________________________________________________________________________ From: schmid@isi.ee.ethz.ch (Hanspeter Schmid) At the physics exam: 'Describe the universe (max. 200 words) and give three examples.' From: garyg@warren.mentorg.com (Gary Gendel) Sometimes real life is stranger than fiction. My physics final came at the time when there was a debate whether to allow calculators in the exams. The Physics department was the first to decide in favor of allowing them, the 3 hour exam had one question: Describe the universe, if Planck's constant were equal to 1. P__________________________________________________________________________ From: N.P.Whittington (N.P.Whittington@spps.hull.ac.uk) Parodies of the laws of thermodynamics, in a science text book. 1. You can't win, you can only break even. 2. You can only break even at absolute zero. 3. You can never reach absolute zero. P_________________________________