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Math Jokes Page 1 (01-13) |
| Mathematics is made
of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50
percent imagination. |
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| Old mathematicians
never die; they just lose some of their functions. |
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| 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..." |
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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. |
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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.
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| 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
..." |
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| 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). |
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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!" |
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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." |
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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." |
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| 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." |
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| 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..." |
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| 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..."
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| 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..." |
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| Golden rule for math
teachers: You must tell the truth, and nothing but
the truth, but not the whole truth. |
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| A math professor is
one who talks in someone else's sleep. |
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Teacher: Now suppose
the number of sheep is x...
Student: Yes sir, but what happens if the number of
sheep is not x? |
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