Ask HN: Any good math jokes?
I'm trying to come up with a good math joke for our math team t-shirts. Last year we had "Know you limits, don't drink and derive." The shirt included a fuzzy graph.
I'm thinking about using an xkcd comic if the author gives me permission, but the images are somewhat small for t-shirts, so I might have to throw my own together anyways.
Got any good ideas?
138 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 208 ms ] threadTo get to the same side.
To get to the other side.
(The mathematicians will know that the chicken's quest will fail. Then they'll feel sorry for the chicken...)
Because 7 8 9!
(7 ate 9)
(Related: Analysts do it continuously, and almost everywhere.)
Biochemists do it with animals.
When civil engineers do it, the earth moves.
Software engineers do it all night long.
(pretty old one)
The fire throws another spark, creating another fire. The physicist wakes up and sees the fire. He calculates that, given the size of the fire, and amount of oxygen needed to be displaced to put out a fire of said size, a glass of water will be sufficient. He fills up his water glass from the sink, and while running to the fire, throws the water at the fire at the exact distance from the fire that gets the water to the fire earliest, putting it out. He drops the glass next to the fireplace and goes to sleep.
The fire sparks once more, and the mathematician wakes up and sees the fire. He looks at the ice bucket and glass sitting next to the fireplace, says "Aha! A solution exists!", and goes back to bed.
It's a math joke, but not one suitable for t-shirts.
A mathematician, an engineer and a physicist were travelling through Scotland when they saw a black sheep through the window of the train.
"Aha", says the engineer, "I see that Scottish sheep are black."
"Hmm", says the physician, "You mean that some Scottish sheep are black".
"Nonono", says the mathematician, "All we know is that there is at least one sheep in Scotland, and that at least one side of that one sheep is black."
(Elephant)(banana)sin(theta)
"be there or c squared minus a squared"
lol
I wish I was your derivative, so I could lie tangent to your curves.
I wish I was mRNA polymerase, so I could unzip your genes.
In fact, wouldn't helicase do better?
Aww yeah.
And as long as we are going for perfect rigor, the function you describe is undefined at x=0; you have to make it piecewise and say "if x=0, then this function is 0". (And I could say something about "you want natural curves, not this artificial pieced-together stuff.")
Also, I believe the Taylor series for that function is well-defined and accurate at all points other than x=0, so you can just pick one of those points. Are there smooth functions whose Taylor series are wrong everywhere? I doubt it. And one might argue that it's pretty problematic that, e.g., with the function "0 if x≤0, e^{-1/x^2} if x>0", a Taylor series at any positive point will be wrong for all negative numbers, and a Taylor series at any nonnegative point will be wrong for all positive numbers... well, I dunno, touching half of the entire range of a curve is still a lot (an infinite amount, in fact).
One could imagine a bunch of functions pieced together to make a smooth function (e.g. "e^{-1/x^2} * e^{-1/(x-1)^2} for 0<x<1, e^{-1/(x-1)^2} * e^{-1/(x-2)^2} for 1<x<2, ...") whose Taylor series are all accurate only over a small, finite domain. I guess that kinda answers my question. But at this point I would apply the "natural curves" objection. I wonder, are there smooth non-piecewise functions whose Taylor series are all wrong like that? (Absolute value is a piecewise function, so I'd probably reject anything with absolute value.)
Similar to - There are 10 kinds on people. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
http://cowbirdsinlove.com/43
There are 1 kinds of people in this world. Those who know how to save bits. The rest are the default case.
(From http://www.math.ualberta.ca/~runde/jokes.html)
No idea why it was initially downvoted, it's good information to point out. So long as you don't make money off the shirts, it's ok to use xkcd comics.
Even if the current size was large enough, he would probably appreciate knowing about his work being printed like that as most people do.
Pee dollars!
Did you see the SNL segment on options? It was put-call parody!
Complex analysis: it's as easy as pulling out an i.
Analysis, something, something. Balls! (I haven't quite finished that one).
edit: Better than xkcd, depending on your sense of humor (i.e., whether you have one) is smbc-comics.com. Dunno how he licenses his stuff though.
Q: What did the difficult cartesian-coordinate system tell his problem-solver when he wanted to visit Antartica?
A: You should go polar!
Q. what did the math teacher say when she saw tennis star monica seles?
A. isosceles
then Transcendental Numbers
more: http://www.metafilter.com/76377/Two-mathematicians-walk-into...
An infinite number of mathematicins walk into a bar. The first one orders a beer. The second orders half a beer. The third, a third of a beer. The bartender says, "what do you think I am, an idiot?" and kicks them all out.
An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first one orders a beer. The second orders two beers. The third, three beers. The bartender says, "you guys owe me a twelfth of a beer."
(Explanation of that last one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%2B2%2B3%2B4%2B... )
A: Beach Hut
(Log Cabin + C)
[Maybe just the formula would fit on a T Shirt, and you get to explain it to people who ask?]
A: natural log cabin
how did the abelian group get to work? it commuted
why do addition and the integers carpool? because theyre a commutative group