Reality Conditions

Sunday, November 18, 2007

Math Jokes

Via the a link in a Quantum Pontiff thread, I found an excellent collection of mathematical humour, which (amazingly) includes many jokes I had never seen or heard before, and many of them good ones! (For highly nerdy values of "good".) For example, the hyperbolas joke made me laugh out loud:


Two hyperbolas were sitting on a plane.

The first hyperbola says to the other "I sure wish I could oscillate."

The second one replies, "Holy crap! A talking hyperbola!"



Fooled you there, didn't I? I bet you were expecting some atrocious mathematical pun instead of a variation of the Great Muffin Joke. Me too, and that's why I laughed.

On a more conventional note, the site includes great lists of "...walks into a bar" jokes, of dubious proof methods (also here), and my favourite math joke ever:

The cocky exponential function e^x is strolling along the road insulting the functions he sees walking by. He scoffs at a wandering polynomial for the shortness of its Taylor series. He snickers at a passing smooth function of compact support and its glaring lack of a convergent power series about many of its points. He positively laughs as he passes x for being nondifferentiable at the origin. He smiles, thinking to himself, "Damn, it's great to be e^x. I'm real analytic everywhere. I'm my own derivative. I blow up faster than anybody and shrink faster too. All the other functions suck."

Lost in his own egomania, he collides with the constant function 3, who is running in terror in the opposite direction.

"What's wrong with you? Why don't you look where you're going?" demands e^x. He then sees the fear in 3's eyes and says "You look terrified!"

"I am!" says the panicky 3. "There's a differential operator just around the corner. If he differentiates me, I'll be reduced to nothing! I've got to get away!" With that, 3 continues to dash off.

"Stupid constant," thinks e^x. "I've got nothing to fear from a differential operator. He can keep differentiating me as long as he wants, and I'll still be there."

So he scouts off to find the operator and gloat in his smooth glory. He rounds the corner and defiantly introduces himself to the operator. "Hi. I'm e^x."

"Hi. I'm d / dy."

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3 Comments:

  • Ha; good one: that cocky e^x got what it deserved!

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 10:34 PM, November 20, 2007  

  • :)

    You know, because of Spanish "la funcion", whenever I anthropomorphize functions I think naturally of them as female. (Except those that have masculine names in Spanish, like sine, cosine or polynomial.) This particular e^x sounds more like a male, though... this has confused me a couple of times when telling the joke in English, making me switch genders in the middle or something.

    By Blogger Alejandro, at 11:06 PM, November 20, 2007  

  • we make up our own math jokes and illustrate famous ones:
    http://excitrus.blogspot.com/search/label/advanced%20mathematics

    By Blogger Marquise de Chiffo-Nier, at 4:49 AM, June 22, 2010  

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