Revealing Mathematical Jokes
It can safely be said that jokes and satire are often the most condensed characterisation of a person, profession or political group.
The same goes for mathematicians – the majority of the populace hold the belief they themselves are not particularly good at maths (or even loathe it) and that the way mathematicians think is especially hard to understand.
We’ll try and take the jocular approach and have tried to collect a few jokes that highlight certain features of the mathematical profession and sometimes we add a comment as to what specific epistemological issue this joke alludes to. And as with all things mathematical, there is of course a theoretical approach to math jokes …
An astronomer, a physicist and a mathematician (it is said) were holidaying in Scotland. Glancing from a train window, they observed a black sheep in the middle of a field.
“How interesting,” observed the astronomer, “all Scottish sheep are black!”
To which the physicist responded, “No, no! Some Scottish sheep are black!”
The mathematician gazed heavenward in supplication, and then intoned, “In Scotland there exists at least one field, containing at least one sheep, at least one side of which is black.
And another nice one:
One day a mathematician decides that he is sick of math. So, he walks down to the fire department and announces that he wants to become a fireman.
The fire chief says, “Well, you look like a good guy. I’d be glad to hire you, but first I have to give you a little test.”
The firechief takes the mathematician to the alley behind the fire department which contains a dumpster, a spigot, and a hose. The chief then says, “OK, you’re walking in the alley and you see the dumpster here is on fire. What do you do?”
The mathematician replies, “Well, I hook up the hose to the spigot, turn the water on, and put out the fire.”
The chief says, “That’s great… perfect. Now I have to ask you just one more question. What do you do if you’re walking down the alley and you see the dumpster is not on fire?”
The mathematician puzzles over the question for awhile and he finally says, “I light the dumpster on fire.”
The chief yells, “What? That’s horrible! Why would you light the dumpster on fire?”
The mathematician replies, “Well, that way I reduce the problem to one I’ve already solved.”
And a nice quotation:
Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them, they translate it into their own language, and forthwith it means something entirely different.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
And don’t miss this one:
Some say the pope is the greatest cardinal.
But others insist this cannot be so, as every pope has a successor.
http://www.workjoke.com/mathematicians-jokes.html
An infinite crowd of mathematicians enters a bar.
The first one orders a pint, the second one a half pint, the third one a quarter pint…
“I understand”, says the bartender - and pours two pints.
Q: When did Bourbaki stop writing books?
A: When they realized that Serge Lang was a single person …
That’s a nice one: Bourbaki was actually a group a academics (officially “Association des collaborateurs de Nicolas Bourbaki” at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, while Serge Lang was a French-born American mathematician known for his work in number theory etc. A member of the Bourbaki group “He was a prolific writer of mathematical texts, often completing one on his summer vacation.”
Theorem. A cat has nine tails.
Proof. No cat has eight tails. Since one cat has one more tail than no cat, it must have nine tails.
http://www.math.ualberta.ca/~runde/jokes.html
Old mathematicians never die; they just lose some of their functions.
There is no logical foundation of mathematics, and Gödel proved it!
A statistician is someone who is good with numbers but lacks the personality to be an accountant.
A mathematician is asked to design a table. He first designs a table with no legs. Then he designs a table with infinitely many legs. He spend the rest of his life generalizing the results for the table with N legs (where N is not necessarily a natural number).
http://www.math.utah.edu/~cherk/mathjokes.html
Another great collection can be found here:
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/topics/MathematicalHumor.html
And the anthology “Foolproof: A Sampling of Mathematical Folk Humor” by Paul Renteln and Alan Dundes
An absent minded professor (alright, it was Norbert Wiener) was moving. His wife, knowing Norbert would forget his address, took out a sheet of paper and wrote it down for him. Later that day, Norbert had a flash of insight, and fumbling for a piece of paper, wrote down his new theorem on the paper his wife gave him. On further reflection, Norbert found a fallacy in this thinking and threw out the paper in disgust. When he came home that night, to the now empty house he moved from, he remembered he had moved, but had no idea where he had moved to. Just then he spied a little girl on the street. “Little girl,” he asked, “my name is Norbert Wiener, do you know where I live now?” “Yes daddy, mommy thought you would forget.”
Two Jews on a train in Russia. One asks the other, “Where are you going?” and the second one replies, “To Kiev.” Whereupon the first says, “You liar, you tell me you are going to Kiev so I would think you are going to Odessa. But I know you are going to Kiev, so why do you lie?”
From Adventures of a Mathematician, Stan Ulam’s autobiography (p. 143)
http://varatek.com/scott/math_jokes.html
And then some:
http://camel.math.ca/Recreation/mjokes-1.html
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.”
http://komplexify.com/epsilon/2008/11/10/the-dirac-river/
(This is about mathematician Paul Dirac.) They have a whole lot of math jokes here:
http://komplexify.com/math/humor.html
And still some more:
http://www.ahajokes.com/math_jokes.html
http://www.sonoma.edu/math/faculty/falbo/jokes.html
It was mentioned on CNN that the new prime number discovered recently is four times bigger than the previous record.
Ha hum … http://www.juliantrubin.com/mathjokes.html
Another one concerning physicists is nice too and must be commended for its poetic form as well as the entangled wit:
The Perils of Modern Living
Well up above the tropostrata
There is a region stark and stellar
Where, on a streak of anti-matter
Lived Dr. Edward Anti-Teller.
Remote from Fusion’s origin,
lived unguessed and unawares
With all his antikith and kin,
And kept macassars on his chairs.
One morning, idling by the sea,
He spied a tin of monstrous girth
That bore three letters: A. E. C.
Out stepped a visitor from Earth.
Then, shouting gladly o’er the sands,
Met two who in their alien ways
Were like as lentils. Their right hands
Clasped, and the rest was gamma rays.
Tropostrata: combination of troposphere and stratosphere. Antimatter and gamma rays: “The presence of … antimatter is detectable by the gamma rays produced when positrons annihilate with nearby matter.”
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