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Ask HN: Any good math jokes?

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Re: Ask HN: Any good math jokes?

#82

Post by waterhouse »

In the fall of 2009, Mr. Apollinax discovered a method of simplifying mathematical expressions with profound, wide-ranging consequences. Mr. Apollinax has given it the name "indiscriminate cancellation". We see its power and reliability here:

  16/64 = 1/4 ;Cancel the 6
  19/95 = 1/5 ;Cancel the 9
  26/65 = 2/5 ;Cancel the 6
  49/98 = 4/8 ;Cancel the 9
Using his new tool, Mr. Apollinax quickly discovered and prove several surprising theorems, including the following:

  sin x / n = six ;Cancel the n
But the most celebrated application of this method of Mr. Apollinax is his amazing discovery of a deep, unexpected connection between the theories of complex numbers and trigonometry and the preparation of Mexican cuisine:

  sin / cos = tan ;definition of tangent
  i / co = ta ;cancel n and s
  i = taco ;multiply both sides by co
[Martin Gardner wrote a couple of April 1st columns about Mr. Apollinax. Worth checking out. Also, it's kind of a cool computer science problem to find number pairs like 16/64. I'll mention that if we generalize it to "abcd...x / bcd...xy = a/y", then there are seven nontrivial (where a,b,c,etc. aren't all the same digit) 3-digit pairs, including 484/847.]

Re: Ask HN: Any good math jokes?

#85

Post by tzs »

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

Q: What's yellow and equivalent to the axiom of choice? A: Zorn's Lemon.

An engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician are riding on a train through the countryside. They look out the window and see a black cow. The engineer says, "Look, all the cows in this county are black!". The physicist sighs, and says "No, at least one cow in this county is black". The mathematician shakes his head sadly and says "There is at least one cow in this county that is black on at least one side".

Q: Why do Jewish mathematicians prefer complex analysis over many other fields of mathematics? A: because it is Cauchy'er.

I was never able to get this one to work out, but maybe someone smarter can do it. There was a line in a physics book I read once that said something like "electromagnetic fields can be described by anti-symmetric tensors of the second bank in four dimensions". I tried to set up a story involving Jewish industrialists who were elected to public office, and who owned farms, being attacked by a bunch of jew-hating males from a local choir, who also happened to work for the a small local bank, who had their farms surrounded and did coordinated attacks from North, South, East and West. The punch line was to be something "elected magnate's fields were defiled by anti-semitic tenors from the Second Bank in four directions". But I never could come up with a story that would end with that, and would bring to mind the corresponding physics so as to make that a groan-worth pun.

Re: Ask HN: Any good math jokes?

#86

Post by RiderOfGiraffes »

There are 10 kinds of methematicians, those that count in ternary and those that don't.

(Not many people, even mathematicians and computer scientists, get that one. I think it's better than the usual crap binary non-joke, and wish I could remember where I heard it)

Re: Ask HN: Any good math jokes?

#88

Post by pillmuncher »

An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician want to catch a lion. The engineer goes to Africa, builds a cage and traps the lion in it. The physicist builds a fence around Africa and pronounces: "I've trapped the lion". The mathematician builds a cage, climbs inside and pronounces: "I am outside".

Re: Ask HN: Any good math jokes?

#89

Post by TeMPOraL »

nayanshah wrote: post #48
nkassis wrote: post #38

There's always the old donut and coffee mug being topologically equivalent. Or the integral of e^X (write it down) Or Pi telling i to be real and i telling Pi to be rational. Or your mom so ugly I had to use the Fourier transform to solve her (just made that one up, probably doesn't make any sense ;p)

+1 for Pi telling i to be real and i telling Pi to be rational

http://roflcopter.pl/math-jokes.jpg
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