Paul's favorite math jokes

• Three professors, a historian, a chemist, and a mathematician, were all staying at the same hotel while attending different conventions. One night, after they retired to their separate rooms, the historian woke up and saw a fire burning in the trash can. Immediately, he ran to the sink, filled the ice bucket with water, doused the flames, and went back to bed. Later that night, the chemist woke up and found a fire in his trash can. He got out of bed, ran to the sink, and whipped out a graduated cylinder. Making some quick calculations, he found the exact amount of water necessary to extinguish the flames, measured the amount (making sure, of course, to read at the bottom of the meniscus), put out the fire, and went back to bed. Sure enough, just before morning, the mathematician awoke and saw a fire in the trash can. He looked over at the sink, saw the ice bucket, looked back at the fire and thought, “A solution exists!” Contentedly, he went back to sleep.

• Question: What is the difference between an introverted mathematician and an extroverted mathematician?

  Answer: An introverted mathematician stares at his own feet while talking to you, while an extroverted one stares at your feet.

• A chemist's proof that all odd numbers are prime: 1 is special; 3 is prime; 5 is prime; 7 is prime; 9 is... uh, 9 is an experimental error; 11 is prime; 13 is prime... Well, that's a representative sample.

• Person A and Person B were introduced to each other at a party. Upon learning that Person A was a mathematician, Person B said, "Oh, I've heard that mathematicians are difficult to get along with." To this, Person A immediately replied, "Certainly not! In fact, I have this friend who is both a mathematician and very easy to get along with. He is so easy going that he has hundreds of friends, and he never gets into arguments. Thus, by this counterexample, we see that your assertion that mathematicians are difficult to get along with is utterly false."

• A man who was living in a country ruled by a cruel dictator was unfairly arrested, blindfolded, and transported to a prison. Once there, he discovered that his cellmate was a mathematician. After a few days, the man managed to escape from the prison. Unfortunately, the prison was located in the middle of a burning desert, hundreds of miles away from the nearest inhabited regions. After stumbling around in the desert for days, the man was recaptured and moved back to his jail cell. When his cellmate saw him return, he told him, "I could have told you that escaping by foot was impossible. I tried the same thing two months ago." At this, the now sunburned, parched, and hungry man became very upset and exclaimed, "Why didn't you tell me that sooner!" The mathematician simply shrugged his shoulders and asked, "Who publishes negative results?"

  On a related note: "We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn't any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work."
  --Richard Feynman, Nobel Lecture, 1966

• A pure mathematician grew tired of proving results about abstract nonsense, and resolved to move into applied mathematics. One day, he saw an announcement for a seminar on the "theory of gears." "What could be more useful than gears?" he thought, and he resolved to attend. At the first session, the speaker started his remarks by observing that, "As everyone knows, the theory of gears with a real number of teeth is already well understood..."

• A mathematician is someone who can begin a sentence with, "As everyone knows," and then finish it with something he just learned.

A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there.
--Charles R. Darwin