![]() All the sheep in Scotland are black!" " No, no, no!" says the physicist. The astronomer looks out of the window, sees a black sheep standing in a field, and remarks, "How odd. Mathematicians are also shown as averse to making hasty generalizations from a small amount of data, even if some form of generalization seems plausible:Īn astronomer, a physicist and a mathematician are on a train in Scotland. The physicist says, "The measurement wasn't accurate." The biologist says, "They must have reproduced." The mathematician says, "If one more person enters the house, then it will be empty." After a while they notice three people leaving the house. First they see two people entering the house. These compare mathematicians to physicists, engineers, or the "soft" sciences in a form similar to an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman, showing the other scientists doing something practical, while the mathematician proposes a theoretically valid but physically nonsensical solution.Ī physicist, a biologist and a mathematician are sitting in a street café watching people entering and leaving a nearby house. Some jokes are based on stereotypes of mathematicians tending to think in complicated, abstract terms, causing them to lose touch with the "real world". Another popular example is:īe rational." Stereotypes of mathematicians A telephone intercept message of "you have dialed an imaginary number, please rotate your handset ninety degrees and try again" is a typical example. Some jokes are based on imaginary number i, treating it as if it is a real number. Mathematical joke playing on the Pythagorean theorem and imaginary numbers Those who can extrapolate from incomplete information." Īnother pun using different radices, asks: There are many alternative versions of the joke, such as "There are two types of people in this world. This joke subverts the trope of phrases that begin with "there are two types of people in the world." and relies on an ambiguous meaning of the expression 10, which in the binary numeral system is equal to the decimal number 2. ![]() There are only 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't. Some jokes depend on ambiguity of numeral bases. Thus, the indefinite integral of 1/cabin is "log(cabin) + C", or "A log cabin plus the sea", i.e., "A houseboat". The second part is then based on the fact that the antiderivative is actually a class of functions, requiring the inclusion of a constant of integration, usually denoted as C-something which calculus students may forget. The first part of this joke relies on the fact that the primitive (formed when finding the antiderivative) of the function 1/ x is log( x). Person 1: No, a houseboat you forgot to add the C! Person 1: What's the integral of 1 / cabin with respect to cabin?
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |