Mathematical Jokes.

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human_calculator
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30 May 2008, 9:57 am

I love maths jokes!Here are some I've found online.

Q: What is non-orientable and lives in the ocean?
A: Möbius Dick...

Q: What do you get if you divide the circumference of a jack-o-lantern by its diameter?
A: Pumpkin Pi!

Q: Why do you rarely find mathematicians spending time at the beach?
A: Because they have sine and cosine to get a tan and don't need the sun!

Trigonometry for farmers: swine and coswine...

Three statisticians go hunting. When they see a rabbit, the first one shoots, missing it on the left. The second one shoots and misses it on the right.
The third one shouts: "We've hit it!"

Q: Why do mathematicians often confuse Christmas and Halloween?
A: Because Oct 31 = Dec 25.

Can someone explain this one please?

Q: How can you tell that a mathematician is extroverted?
A: When talking to you, he looks at your shoes instead of at his.

AnnaLemma
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30 May 2008, 10:06 am

This is from just a few days ago on a running list I belong to:

So i says to pi, "come on, be rational." Pi responds, "oh, get real!"

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DeaconBlues
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30 May 2008, 10:41 am

human_calculator wrote:

Q: Why do mathematicians often confuse Christmas and Halloween?
A: Because Oct 31 = Dec 25.

Can someone explain this one please?

Q: How can you tell that a mathematician is extroverted?
A: When talking to you, he looks at your shoes instead of at his.

I'm not sure which one you wanted explained; the latter would seem obvious to anyone on the spectrum, I should think.

As for the former, oct is short for octal, or base-8 numbering, while dec is decimal, our old familiar base-10 friend. And octal 31 is indeed equal to decimal 25 (and hexadecimal [base-16] 19, for what it's worth...).

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sartresue
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30 May 2008, 2:13 pm

Mathemaniac topic

Nightly algebra homework=Do the math in prime time

Numbers stuck in a rut=repeating decimals

Q Why don't two parallel lines meet?
A Because they have nothing in common.

:lol:

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twoshots
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30 May 2008, 4:46 pm

How to put an elephant in a refrigerator wrote:

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 5 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.

Quote:

A mathematician, an engineer and a chemist are at a conference. They are staying in adjoining rooms. One evening they are downstairs in the bar. The mathematician goes to bed first. The chemist goes next, followed a minute or two later by the engineer. The chemist notices that in the corridor outside their rooms a rubbish bin is ablaze. There is a bucket of water nearby. The chemist starts concocting a means of generating carbon dioxide in order to create a makeshift extinguisher but before he can do so the engineer arrives, dumps the water on the fire and puts it out. The next morning the chemist and engineer tell the mathematician about the fire. He admits he saw it. They ask him why he didn't put it out. He replies contemptuously "there was a fire and a bucket of water: a solution obviously existed."

And finally, a pun,

Q. What's purple and commutes ?
A. An Abelian grape.

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LabPet
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31 May 2008, 1:05 am

Nicely done, twoshots! QED

I can sometimes 'flash count,' which means I can know how many without counting.

Flash counting joke: A shepherd was known for his uncanny ability to flash count sheep on the field, even counting up to 100s of sheep at a glance! He could 'know' if there was a sheep missing from the flock (ie: strayed, eaten by a wolf). Others learned of his ability and relied upon him for this very useful and unusual trait. Then, one day another shepherd asked him if there was a trick to this flash counting technique since it's otherwise hard to explain. The counting shepherd said, "Yes. I count the legs, then divide by 4."

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D1nk0
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31 May 2008, 11:46 am

For some reason mathematics isnt funny to me . That doesnt mean I dont Love though, its too serious and intense.

kip
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01 Jun 2008, 4:35 pm

twoshots wrote:

Haha!

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abstrusemortal
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01 Jun 2008, 8:44 pm

LabPet wrote:

Yeah, me too; I work in a pharmacy where I had to count medication and it's a good skill to have. There are other people (two of which I've read about) - diagnosed with autism - who flash count. They were these twins in a book (non-fictional), "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: and Other Clinical Tales " by Oliver Sacks, that could flash count - described previously. They had some pretty cool skills.

There was a time, when Oliver was in the nursery home with these twins, where he saw them in a corner by themselves. He went closer to see what they were up to and overheard them exchanging numbers. He heard one of the numbers (6 figures) and that night he looked up a source with a list of prime numbers, since he guessed right that they were primes, and concluded, since that one number was a prime, that they were exchanging prime numbers. He went back the next day with a whooping 10-digit prime number. At first they were a little dumbfounded - he had the patience to sit with them first and wait for them to accept him before he spouted the number in their face. Then they smiled at each other and spouted out some higher digit prime numbers. Sacks looked in his source and found a number a higher figure than his. Eventually they surpassed him with a 20-digit prime number, whereby he couldn't respond, since his source didn't go that high ( this was like 20-30 years ago, so there weren't the sources available today for finding prime numbers).

Anyways, if any of you have the chance, it's a cool book to read. Lots of interesting tales on the dramatic, yet somewhat positive in most of the cases - and humorous, side of medicine.

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LabPet
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01 Jun 2008, 8:57 pm

abstrusemortal wrote:

LabPet wrote:

That's great! Thank you - I'll have to check out that book. Good know we're not alone.....

I would think, for you, being in a pharmacy is real asset (even if we sometimes accidentally scare others)! I am a prime number fan!! !!

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human_calculator
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06 Aug 2008, 3:38 pm

it isn't a joke exactly but try this LabPet

http://www.braincurls.com/fc/loader.html

its a flash counting game-very easy though, i got 3344 points on my first go.

Orwell
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06 Aug 2008, 4:33 pm

human_calculator wrote:

it isn't a joke exactly but try this LabPet

http://www.braincurls.com/fc/loader.html

its a flash counting game-very easy though, i got 3344 points on my first go.

That's fun. I got 3355 on the first attempt, though it didn't seem to be what I normally think of as "flash counting"- a skill I don't have. It was always ordered into pretty easily digestible groups, and you only needed to count one, sometimes not even that.

LabPet or other flash-counters, do you want to try the game and tell us what a perfect score comes out as?

EDIT: N/M, the challenge is different every time you play. My second attempt I made fewer mistakes, but came out with a lower score because I was shown smaller quantities to count.

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lau
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06 Aug 2008, 4:59 pm

2329, but I was caught out by a sudden transition from trivial patterns to a slightly more complex one, just when I was getting bored.

What did it have to do with counting? It seemed to require mathematics - just squares, triangular numbers and multiplication.

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Orwell
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06 Aug 2008, 5:07 pm

lau wrote:

What did it have to do with counting? It seemed to require mathematics - just squares, triangular numbers and multiplication.

You did have to be able to flash count up to about 7, while keeping track of what needed to be multiplied, so you had to flash count several small quantities very quickly. But agreed, overall not that much counting. Does anyone know of a more difficult version of this? Something that's like level 5 or harder the whole way?

Anyways, for a mathematical joke. My calculus textbook was describing how to find some antiderivative. When explaining the method, here is what was written: "With some luck and ingenuity, you might be able to guess..."

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twoshots
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06 Aug 2008, 5:50 pm

Keep in mind, I'm pretty sure normal people can't flash count numbers higher than 7 or so (that's around the upper level of the number of objects a human can keep track of). So if you don't make it a matter of pattern usage, the ability to play the game just breaks down to who has a photographic memory and/or is autistic and who doesn't/isn't.

People do kind of suck at immediate recall. I remember an experiment once in which it was demonstrated that chimpanzees completely pwned people that involved a task of touching blocks in a certain order after only briefly being shown the order.

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wolphin
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06 Aug 2008, 10:17 pm

3359, it's all about paying attention to the patterns

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