tl;dr: They were down there talking about math one afternoon and the owner of the deli was trying to take the order from one of them and he was a little bit too preoccupied with mathematics to fully engage in the sandwich ordering process.
The story behind the Connecticut deli math sign
21–30 of 64 posts
Re: The story behind the Connecticut deli math sign
#22"What's purple and commutes?" "An abelian grape"
"What's yellow and equivalent to the axiom of choice?" "Zorn's Lemon"
Evidently there's something inherently funny about group theory.
Re: The story behind the Connecticut deli math sign
#23Does anyone remember the story about the famous mathematician at (I think) Princeton, who would always pick 3 as a random number in his examples. ("Let's pick a random number, say 3...") And then he ended up mentoring an entire generation of mathematicians who adopted his habit. And everyone would always "randomly" pick 3. It became a thing. It's kind of a variant on the "let L be a group" because the joke relies ent…
https://www.xkcd.com/221/
Re: The story behind the Connecticut deli math sign
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Typically, you'd use G when picking a variable name for a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_(mathematics) The equivalent programmer joke might be something like "int str;" or "string array_length;" It's kind of funny in the "oh that's a really bad joke" kind of way :)
"Let ε Or a similar but more blatant telling of the original joke would be "Let ℵ₀ be a group."
Our real analysis lecturer once put this question on the blackboard (with sum as the proper scientific sum notation).
Even though we all knew the answer as trivial it took most of us some time to figure it out in such screwy notation (his point was that our mind is not invariant WRT notation, do not make up monsters when the normal schemas exist)
Re: The story behind the Connecticut deli math sign
#25Re: The story behind the Connecticut deli math sign
#26Does anyone remember the story about the famous mathematician at (I think) Princeton, who would always pick 3 as a random number in his examples. ("Let's pick a random number, say 3...") And then he ended up mentoring an entire generation of mathematicians who adopted his habit. And everyone would always "randomly" pick 3. It became a thing. It's kind of a variant on the "let L be a group" because the joke relies ent…
https://www.xkcd.com/221/
Re: The story behind the Connecticut deli math sign
#27Does anyone remember the story about the famous mathematician at (I think) Princeton, who would always pick 3 as a random number in his examples. ("Let's pick a random number, say 3...") And then he ended up mentoring an entire generation of mathematicians who adopted his habit. And everyone would always "randomly" pick 3. It became a thing. It's kind of a variant on the "let L be a group" because the joke relies ent…
Re: The story behind the Connecticut deli math sign
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.xkcd.com/221/
Is that a reference to the hilariously broken PS3 RNG? For those unaware, the PS3 was jailbroken because their RNG always returned 4.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_number_generator_attack...
Re: The story behind the Connecticut deli math sign
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still don't get it. :/
Typically, you'd use G when picking a variable name for a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_(mathematics) The equivalent programmer joke might be something like "int str;" or "string array_length;" It's kind of funny in the "oh that's a really bad joke" kind of way :)
Re: The story behind the Connecticut deli math sign
#30tl;dr: They were down there talking about math one afternoon and the owner of the deli was trying to take the order from one of them and he was a little bit too preoccupied with mathematics to fully engage in the sandwich ordering process.