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

http://www.sgoc.de/math.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.

by Harold P. Furth

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.”

• everyone who’s good at languages should be able to cope with mathematics and
• if people grapple with math it might be caused by the didactical methods and not by a lack of mathematical talent.

While language is picked up through the intimate communication between child and parent, there is no equally relaxed and subtle communication about math in these first formative years. Maybe there should be. Children can pick up more than one native language, some children speaking not only two but four and more fluently by the age of three or four. What if mathematics were just another language and picked up just as easily?

This article is to give future generations and you as parents a little hope and some pointers. We are currently developing teaching concepts for pain- and effortless mathematical education at our sister website www.viaregia.ch which will address exactly these issues. While we’re still in preparation phase, we want to shed a little light on what to expect from these methods soon.

Before we write a whole book on the subject (you will find one on the subject on www.captainmnemo.net in the near future) let us share some bullet points here:

a) (multiplication) tables are not calculated, they’re learnt by heart (and by rote in most cases, although we’re going to address that on www.viaregia.ch too). Giving children the impression that adults calculated confuses children. Let’s be honest with them.

b) Mathematics itself has much to do with pattern recognition and analysis, in geometry it’s obvious, but it is equally true for set theory, number theory, topology and all other areas of mathematics.

c) To be able to think mathematically you need to think logically; the formal logic underlying speech analysis and discourse is much the same as is used in mathematics.

d) Even babies have an idea of numbers or otherwise they would not be able to recognise if something was missing from or added to a group of identical items, e.g. building blocks. In the very first days after birth babies can already distinguish between the cardinal number two and three.

e) But when it comes to sets greater than three, a different mechanism seems to operate in the human brain. Up to three items are recognised immediately, if the number increases, the recognition time increases too, suggestion that now a counting mechanism is employed.

f) If you look at calculation tables from 1 to 100 then you need not remember 100 facts but just 18 (!), since 3*7 is the same as 7*3, bringing it down to fifty, then allowing for the first row being from 1 to 10, so you can deduct that, equally 1*10 to 10*10 etc. 18 items to learn by heart and still children and even many adults struggle here while as a six-year-old they already knew up to 100,000 words in their native language (when counting “go” and “went” as separate words). Amazing. This points to some obstacle that is on one hand rather obstinate while suggesting that it on the other hand should be quite easy to overcome once analysed properly. This is what workingmath.com is all about …

One reason for this seems to be that mathematics is a type of language but that mathematical entities, esp. numbers are expressed both in the language of mathematics as well as in normal speech. It’s as if you tried to force a bilingual child to always listen in one and answer in the other language. And indeed, children whose native language mimics the mathematical number constructs more closely also learn their tables etc. much easier and earlier, e.g. Japanese and Chinese. While English speakers need to figure out that twelve means ten and two, while twenty-three means two tens and three, the Chinese know this to be ten-two (12) and two-tens and three (23) etc. that’s probably the main reason why Chinese children at age four can count to forty, while US-American children just master fifteen at that age.

All readers will hopefully agree that Chinese and US or English toddlers are born equal and that there’s no room for ideas about racial supremacy. If that is so, then we need to rethink how math, and arithmetic for starters, is taught at school, in fact, how the foundations should be laid in pre-school so that mathematical thinking for children becomes as effortless as the grasp of their native language at that age normally is. Stay tuned, we will shed more light on exactly this problem and some possible solutions in this blog.

Watch future posts on this blog regarding all aspects of mathematics that we’ll eventually cover. For today, just consider this:

About 75% of all arithmetic you need later in life is simple additions, maybe 20% subtractions, then very little multiplications while the times you need to really divide any larger numbers is negligible in comparison. This leads to two simultaneous conclusions: you should be a good adder to master everyday mathematical requirements but you also ought to master those calculations that you rarely need.  It’s like when you’re driving: you need to know about the accelerator, the steering wheel etc., in short you need to be able to at least navigate your car. But from time to time you need to check the oil, the brake fluid etc., even if you normally let someone else check on these. You most certainly should know that mixing the two up could be life-threatening or at least damage your engine. Certainly you need to be able to refill the windscreen washer system by yourself if necessary or check the tyres and be able to (re)inflate them. And you need to be able to sense if something’s awry even if you’re not able to finally diagnose it, much less repair it, right?It’s very much the same with basic mathematics: you need at least to be able to understand if someone else who does calculations affecting you (like your bank calculating your mortgage, your insurance broker or a real-estate agent) are on the right track at all. I’ve seen bankers getting 30 year mortgages all wrong, and many people think that if something increases 7% per year then after 10 years that means to look at 170% - while actually any capital that bears 7% interest annually would effectively double in ten years time.

You need to be able to add and multiply to work out these or it could cost you dearly.

Now, while we all know that in later life we need very, very little of the mathematics e.g. taught at high school, we do know that no kid can get away without it while there or else they won’t move on to college or even any decent job if they don’t get some respectable grades. It acts more as a filter rather than anything else and all parents want their kids to squeeze past these.

Unfortunately, if there are gaps in your or your children’s mathematical understanding, you will never get a real grasp of the subject matter, although anyone with a brain can master at least high school mathematics!

So we designed a course that will let everyone start at the proficiency level they really have and end at where they want to get to. You see, if you go to a restaurant that looks run-down, the food is served cold and arranged so that it turns you off you won’t eat much or nothing at all and you won’t return. Maybe they can force you to return, but they can’t make you eat or at least they can’t make you enjoy it, can they? If, likewise, at school you feel uneasy about a subject then they may be able to force you back there five days a week but you and they find you won’t really learn much, right? Did you draw the conclusion, from visiting a scrubby restaurant, that eating is not for you? Well, you may have been lucky and indeed have tasted some delicious food somewhere else before you visited. That made you quite immune to the thought that eating isn’t for you, probably. And so, if you visit that scrubby restaurant, it will only have been twice: the first and last time (nice math pun …). Unfortunately, the first time you or your kids were confronted with mathematics in earnest it might just not have tasted right and from then on you and calculus were at loggerheads. However, with the way schools operate you were barred from taking your custom elsewhere resp. you knew that the math restaurant next door wasn’t any better.

In comes workingmath.com where we try to cover all the subjects that might interest you around mathematics and its sister sites viaregia.ch where soon our computer-based training courses will begin while on CaptainMnemo.Net you are taken through actually the whole syllabus, not only math, by Captain Mnemo in his miraculous submarine cum spaceship exploring the wonders of nature while finding mathematical structures in the spiralling snail shell as well as in outer space when approaching black holes and spiralling galaxies. Start watching this spot, subscribe to our newsletters and RSS feeds and we’ll keep you posted, to show you how to climb the path to brilliance!