We are concerned that publication of sacral lecture jokes may endanger the respect to math. teachers in freshmen classes. Our excuse for this risky ethnographic research is that the majority of the jokes already exists on the Internet.

Sometimes, people tend to attribute the jokes either to their beloved teachers (Peter Lax is so far the champion) or to legendary figures as Norbert Wiener or Paul Erdos; similarly, physical jokes are attributed to Albert Einstein or Niels Bohr and geometrical theorems - to Euclid. A number of collected jokes we learned from our professors in Saint-Petersburg. Generally, attributing the jokes is hopeless. Indeed, the phrasing of the narrator is as important as the essence of the humor (if this essence does exist at all). To our mind, a joke goes to "public domain" immediately after being created or modified and there should be no authorship in it. Most of the collected sayings and jokes are repeated in a number of webpages, which makes it difficult to credit a particular Internet source. Instead, we thank all Internet collectors of math. jokes.

Please email us your comments and new stories: cherk@math.utah.edu. Enjoy!

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The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell. (St. Augustine)

The difference between an introvert and extrovert mathematicians is: An introvert mathematician looks at his shoes while talking to you. An extrovert mathematician looks at your shoes.

Mathematics is like checkers in being suitable for the young, not too difficult, amusing, and without peril to the state. (Plato)

Here is the illustration of this principle: One evening Rene Descartes went to relax at a local tavern. The tender approached and said, "Ah, good evening Monsieur Descartes! Shall I serve you the usual drink?". Descartes replied, "I think not.", and promptly vanished.

Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them, they translate it into their own language, and forthwith it means something entirely different. -- Goethe

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2. A mathematician and ...

The following sketches show our dedication to abstract thinking in the most unusual situations and strong belief in the universality of mathematical methods. Mathematicians are always impatient and intelligent.

A mathematician and a Wall street broker went to races. The broker suggested to bet $10,000 on a horse. The mathematician was sceptical, saying that he wanted first to understand the rules, to look on horses, etc. The broker whispered that he knew a secret algorithm for the success, but he could not convince the mathematician.

"You are too theoretical," he said and bet on a horse. Surely, that horse came first bringing him a lot of money. Triumphantly, he exclaimed:

"I told you, I knew the secret!"

"What is your secret?" the mathematician asked.

"It is rather easy. I have two kids, three and five year old. I sum up their ages and I bet on number nine."

"But, three and five is eight," the mathematician protested.

"I told you, you are too theoretical!" the broker replied, "Haven't I just shown experimentally, that my calculation is correct! 3+5=9!"

A mathematician, a physicist, an engineer went again to the races and laid their money down. Commiserating in the bar after the race, the engineer says, "I don't understand why I lost all my money. I measured all the horses and calculated their strength and mechanical advantage and figured out how fast they could run..."

The physicist interrupted him: "...but you didn't take individual variations into account. I did a statistical analysis of their previous performances and bet on the horses with the highest probability of winning..."

"...so if you're so hot why are you broke?" asked the engineer. But before the argument can grow, the mathematician takes out his pipe and they get a glimpse of his well-fattened wallet. Obviously here was a man who knows something about horses. They both demanded to know his secret.

"Well," he says, "first I assumed all the horses were identical and spherical..."

An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician are staying in a hotel.

The engineer wakes up and smells smoke. He goes out into the hallway and sees a fire, so he fills a trash can from his room with water and douses the fire. He goes back to bed.

Later, the physicist wakes up and smells smoke. He opens his door and sees a fire in the hallway. He walks down the hall to a fire hose and after calculating the flame velocity, distance, water pressure, trajectory, etc. extinguishes the fire with the minimum amount of water and energy needed.

Later, the mathematician wakes up and smells smoke. He goes to the hall, sees the fire and then the fire hose. He thinks for a moment and then exclaims, "Ah, a solution exists!" and then goes back to bed.

A physicist and a mathematician are sitting in a faculty lounge. Suddenly, the coffee machine catches on fire. The physicist grabs a bucket and leap towards the sink, filled the bucket with water and puts out the fire. Second day, the same two sit in the same lounge. Again, the coffee machine catches on fire. This time, the mathematician stands up, got a bucket, hands the bucket to the physicist, thus reducing the problem to a previously solved one.

Another version:

A biologist, a physicist and a mathematician were sitting in a street cafe watching the crowd. Across the street they saw a man and a woman entering a building. Ten minutes they reappeared together with a third person.

- They have multiplied, said the biologist.

- Oh no, an error in measurement, the physicist sighed.

- If exactly one person enters the building now, it will be empty again, the mathematician concluded.

Several scientists were all posed the following question: "What is 2 * 2 ?"

The engineer whips out his slide rule (so it's old) and shuffles it back and forth, and finally announces "3.99".

The physicist consults his technical references, sets up the problem on his computer, and announces "it lies between 3.98 and 4.02".

The mathematician cogitates for a while, then announces: "I don't know what the answer is, but I can tell you, an answer exists!".

Philosopher smiles: "But what do you mean by 2 * 2 ?"

Logician replies: "Please define 2 * 2 more precisely."

The sociologist: "I don't know, but is was nice talking about it".

Behavioral Ecologist: "A polygamous mating system".

Medical Student : "4" All others looking astonished : "How did you know ??" Medical Student : :I memorized it."



A physicist, a mathematician, and a mystic were asked to name the greatest invention of all time. The physicist chose the fire, which gave humanity the power over matter. The mathematician chose the alphabet, which gave humanity power over symbols. The mystic chose the thermos bottle.

"Why a thermos bottle?" the others asked.

"Because the thermos keeps hot liquids hot in winter and cold liquids cold in summer."

"Yes -- so what?"

"Think about it." said the mystic reverently. That little bottle -- how does it *know*?"

At least this time we are together with the physicist! :

An chemist, a physicist, and a mathematician are stranded on an island when a can of food rolls ashore. The chemist and the physicist comes up with many ingenious ways to open the can. Then suddenly the mathematician gets a bright idea: "Assume we have a can opener ..."

A mathematician is asked to design a table. He first designs a table with no legs. Then he designs a table with infinitely many legs. He spend the rest of his life generalizing the results for the table with N legs (where N is not necessarily a natural number).

Several scientists were all posed the following question: "What is pi ?"

The engineer said: "It is approximately 3 and 1/7"

The physicist said: "It is 3.14159"

The mathematician thought a bit, and replied "It is equal to pi".

(A nutritionist: "Pie is a healthy and delicious dessert!" )

An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician were asked to hammer a nail into a wall.

The engineer went to build a Universal Automatic Nailer -- a device able to hammer every possible nail into every possible wall.

The physicist conducted series of experiments on strength of hammers, nails, and walls and developed a revolutionary technology of ultra-sonic nail hammering at super-low temperature.

The mathematician generalized the problem to a N dimensional problem of penetration of a knotted one dimensional nail into a N-1 dimensional hyper-wall. Several fundamental theorems are proved. Of course, the problem is too rich to suggest a possibility of a simple solution, even the existence of a solution is far from obvious.

A mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer were traveling through Scotland when they saw a black sheep through the window of the train.

"Aha," says the engineer, "I see that Scottish sheep are black."

"Hmm," says the physicist, "You mean that some Scottish sheep are black."

"No," says the mathematician, "All we know is that there is at least one sheep in Scotland, and that at least one side of that one sheep is black!"

A mathematician, scientist, and engineer are each asked: "Suppose we define a horse's tail to be a leg. How many legs does a horse have?" The mathematician answers "5"; the scientist "1"; and the engineer says "But you can't do that!

A mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer are all given identical rubber balls and told to find the volume. They are given anything they want to measure it, and have all the time they need. The mathematician pulls out a measuring tape and records the circumference. He then divides by two times pi to get the radius, cubes that, multiplies by pi again, and then multiplies by four-thirds and thereby calculates the volume. The physicist gets a bucket of water, places 1.00000 gallons of water in the bucket, drops in the ball, and measures the displacement to six significant figures. And the engineer? He writes down the serial number of the ball, and looks it up.

A Mathematician (M) and an Engineer (E) attend a lecture by a Physicist. The topic concerns Kulza-Klein theories involving physical processes that occur in spaces with dimensions of 9, 12 and even higher. The M is sitting, clearly enjoying the lecture, while the E is frowning and looking generally confused and puzzled. By the end the E has a terrible headache. At the end, the M comments about the wonderful lecture.

E: "How do you understand this stuff?"

M: "I just visualize the process"

E: "How can you POSSIBLY visualize something that occurs in 9-dimensional space?"

M: "Easy, first visualize it in N-dimensional space, then let N go to 9"

A team of engineers were required to measure the height of a flag pole. They only had a measuring tape, and were getting quite frustrated trying to keep the tape along the pole. It kept falling down, etc. A mathematician comes along, finds out their problem, and proceeds to remove the pole from the ground and measure it easily. When he leaves, one engineer says to the other: "Just like a mathematician! We need to know the height, and he gives us the length!"

A mathematician and a physicist agree to a psychological experiment. The (hungry) mathematician is put in a chair in a large empty room and his favorite meal, perfectly prepared, is placed at the other end of the room. The psychologist explains, "You are to remain in your chair. Every minute, I will move your chair to a position halfway between its current location and the meal." The mathematician looks at the psychologist in disgust. "What? I'm not going to go through this. You know I'll never reach the food!" And he gets up and storms out.

The psychologist ushers the physicist in. He explains the situation, and the physicist's eyes light up and he starts drooling. The psychologist is a bit confused. "Don't you realize that you'll never reach the food?" T he physicist smiles and replies: "Of course! But I'll get close enough for all practical purposes!"

One day a farmer called up an engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician and asked them to fence of the largest possible area with the least amount of fence.

The engineer made the fence in a circle and proclaimed that he had the most efficient design.

The physicist made a long, straight line and proclaimed "We can assume the length is infinite..." and pointed out that fencing off half of the Earth was certainly a more efficient way to do it.

The Mathematician just laughed at them. He built a tiny fence around himself and said "I declare myself to be on the outside."

The physicist and the engineer are in a hot-air balloon. Soon, they find themselves lost in a canyon somewhere. They yell out for help: "Helllloooooo! Where are we?"

15 minutes later, they hear an echoing voice: "Helllloooooo! You're in a hot-air balloon!!"

The physicist says, "That must have been a mathematician."

The engineer asks, "Why do you say that?"

The physicist replied: "The answer was absolutely correct, and it was utterly useless."

Several scientists were asked to prove that all odd integers higher than 2 are prime.

Mathematician: 3 is a prime, 5 is a prime, 7 is a prime, and by induction - every odd integer higher than 2 is a prime.

Physicist: 3 is a prime, 5 is a prime, 7 is a prime, 9 is an experimental error, 11 is a prime. Just to be sure, try several randomly chosen numbers: 17 is a prime, 23 is a prime...

Engineer: 3 is a prime, 5 is a prime, 7 is a prime, 9 is an approximation to a prime, 11 is a prime,...

Programmer (reading the output on the screen): 3 is a prime, 3 is a prime, 3 a is prime, 3 is a prime....

Biologist: 3 is a prime, 5 is a prime, 7 is a prime, 9 -- results have not arrived yet,...

Psychologist: 3 is a prime, 5 is a prime, 7 is a prime, 9 is a prime but tries to suppress it,...

Chemist (or Dan Quayle): What's a prime?

Politician: "Some numbers are prime.. but the goal is to create a kinder, gentler society where all numbers are prime... "

Programmer: "Wait a minute, I think I have an algorithm from Knuth on finding prime numbers... just a little bit longer, I've found the last bug... no, that's not it... ya know, I think there may be a compiler bug here - oh, did you want IEEE-998.0334 rounding or not? - was that in the spec? - hold on, I've almost got it - I was up all night working on this program, ya know... now if management would just get me that new workstation that just came out, I'd be done by now... etc., etc. ..."

(Two is the oddest prime of all, because it's the only one that's even!)

Dean, to the physics department. "Why do I always have to give you guys so much money, for laboratories and expensive equipment and stuff. Why couldn't you be like the math. department - all they need is money for pencils, paper and waste-paper baskets. Or even better, like the philosophy department. All they need are pencils and paper."

A mathematician, an engineer, and a chemist were walking down the road when they saw a pile of cans of beer. Unfortunately, they were the old-fashioned cans that do not have the tab at the top. One of them proposed that they split up and find can openers. The chemist went to his lab and concocted a magical chemical that dissolves the can top in an instant and evaporates the next instant so that the beer inside is not affected. The engineer went to his workshop and created a new HyperOpener that can open 25 cans per second.

They went back to the pile with their inventions and found the mathematician finishing the last can of beer. "How did you manage that?" they asked in astonishment. The mathematician answered, "Oh, well, I assumed they were open and went from there."

An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician find themselves in an anecdote, indeed an anecdote quite similar to many that you have no doubt already heard. After some observations and rough calculations the engineer realizes the situation and starts laughing. A few minutes later the physicist understands too and chuckles to himself happily as he now has enough experimental evidence to publish a paper.

This leaves the mathematician somewhat perplexed, as he had observed right away that he was the subject of an anecdote, and deduced quite rapidly the presence of humor from similar anecdotes, but considers this anecdote to be too trivial a corollary to be significant, let alone funny.

A mathematician organizes a lottery in which the prize is an infinite amount of money. When the winning ticket is drawn, and the jubilant winner comes to claim his prize, the mathematician explains the mode of payment: "1 dollar now, 1/2 dollar next week, 1/3 dollar the week after that..."

A Mathematician was put in a room. The room contains a table and three metal spheres about the size of a softball. He was told to do whatever he wants with the balls and the table in one hour. After an hour, the balls are arranges in a triangle at the center of the table. The same test is given to a Physicist. After an hour, the balls are stacked one on top of the other in the center of the table. Finally, an Engineer was tested. After an hour, one of the balls is broken, one is missing, and he's carrying the third out in his lunchbox.

A mathematician decides he wants to learn more about practical problems. He sees a seminar with a nice title: "The Theory of Gears." So he goes. The speaker stands up and begins, "The theory of gears with a real number of teeth is well known ..."

When a statistician passes the airport security check, they discover a bomb in his bag. He explains. "Statistics shows that the probability of a bomb being on an airplane is 1/1000. However, the chance that there are two bombs at one plane is 1/1000000. So, I am much safer..."

What is the difference between a Psychotic, a Neurotic and a mathematician? A Psychotic believes that 2+2=5. A Neurotic knows that 2+2=4, but it kills him. A mathematician simply changes the base.

Q: What will a logician choose: a half of an egg or eternal bliss in the afterlife? A: A half of an egg! Because nothing is better than eternal bliss in the afterlife, and a half of an egg is better than nothing.

A physicist has been conducting experiments and has worked out a set of equations which seem to explain his data. He asks a mathematician to check them. A week later, the mathematician calls "I'm sorry, but your equations are complete nonsense." "But these equations accurately predict results of experiments. Are you sure they are completely wrong? "To be precise, they are not always a complete nonsense. But the only case in which they are true is the trivial one where the field is Archimedean..."



A mathematician belives nothing until it is proven

A physicist believes everything until it is proven wrong

A chemist doesn't care

biologist doesn't understand the question.

An engineer and a topologist were locked in the rooms for a day with a can of food but without an opener. At the end of the day, the engineer is sitting on the floor of his room and eating from the open can: He threw it against the walls until it cracked open. In the mathematician's room, the can is still closed but the mathematician has disappeared. There are strange noises coming from inside the can... When it is opened and the mathematician crawls out. "Damn! I got a sign wrong..."

A mathematician has spent ten years trying to prove the Riemann hypothesis. Finally, he decides to sell his soul to the devil in exchange for a proof. The devil promises to deliver a proof in the four weeks. Half a year later, the devil shows up again - in a rather gloomy mood. "I'm sorry", he says. "I couldn't prove the hypothesis either. But" - and his face lightens up - "I think I found a really interesting lemma..."

To mathematicians, solutions mean finding the answers. But to chemists, solutions are things that are still all mixed up.

