Mathematical joke
Mathematician and author John Allen Paulos in his book Mathematics and Humor described several ways that mathematics, generally considered a dry, formal activity, overlaps with humor, a loose, irreverent activity: both are forms of "intellectual play"; both have "logic, pattern, rules, structure"; and both are "economical and explicit".
Exoteric jokes are intelligible to the outsiders, and most of them compare mathematicians with representatives of other disciplines or with common folk.
Occasionally, multiple mathematical puns appear in the same jest: When Noah sends his animals to go forth and multiply, a pair of snakes replies "We can't multiply, we're adders" – so Noah builds them a log table.
[7]This invokes four double meanings: adder (snake) vs. addition (algebraic operation); multiplication (biological reproduction) vs. multiplication (algebraic operation); log (a cut tree trunk) vs. log (logarithm); and table (set of facts) vs. table (piece of furniture).
[8] Other jokes create a double meaning from a direct calculation involving facetious variable names, such as this retold from Gravity's Rainbow:[9] Person 1: What's the integral of 1/cabin with respect to cabin?
[10] 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).
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.
There are only 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't.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.
Because 31 Oct = 25 Dec.[13][14] The play on words lies in the similarity of the abbreviation for October/Octal and December/Decimal, and the coincidence that both equal the same number (
A telephone intercept message of "you have dialed an imaginary number, please rotate your handset ninety degrees and try again" is a typical example.
"[16] Some jokes are based on stereotypes of mathematicians tending to think in complicated, abstract terms, causing them to lose touch with the "real world".
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.
A physicist, a biologist and a mathematician are sitting in a street café watching people entering and leaving a nearby house.
"[17]Mathematicians are also shown as averse to making hasty generalizations from a small amount of data, even if some form of generalization seems plausible: An astronomer, a physicist and a mathematician are on a train in Scotland.
The mathematician rolls his eyes at his companions' muddled thinking and says, "In Scotland, there is at least one sheep, at least one side of which appears to be black from here some of the time.
"[18][19]A classic joke involving stereotypes is the "Dictionary of Definitions of Terms Commonly Used in Math Lectures".
"That skeleton's sixty-five million and three years, two months and eighteen days old," the employee replied.
"[21]The joke is that the employee fails to understand the scientist's implication of the uncertainty in the age of the fossil and uses false precision.
These constructions are generally devoid of any substantial mathematical content, besides some basic arithmetic.
A set of jokes applies mathematical reasoning to situations where it is not entirely valid.
Many are based on a combination of well-known quotes and basic logical constructs such as syllogisms: Another set of jokes relates to the absence of mathematical reasoning, or misinterpretation of conventional notation:
[24] Some jokes attempt a seemingly plausible, but in fact impossible, mathematical operation.
[28] The number 42 appears prominently in the Douglas Adams trilogy The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where it is portrayed as "the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything".
The humor in this statement originates from a linguistic play on numbers and fundamental arithmetic.
[33] The jest may be formulated as a mathematical problem where the result, when read upside down, appears to be an identifiable phrase like "ShELL OIL" or "Esso" using seven-segment display character representations where the open-top "4" is an inverted 'h' and '5' looks like 'S'.
An oft-repeated joke is that topologists cannot tell a coffee cup from a doughnut,[36] since they are topologically equivalent: a sufficiently pliable doughnut could be reshaped (by a homeomorphism) to the form of a cup by creating a dimple and progressively enlarging it, while shrinking the hole into a handle.
Category theory is a common source of esoteric mathematical jokes, due to its high level of abstraction.
Thus, A coconut is just a nut.The joke is that when the dual is taken twice, the direction of the arrows remains the same, and hence the double "co-" is redundant.
Another joke references a quote by Alfréd Rényi: "A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems."
[37]Not only are "coffee" and "theorems" dualized, their order is also swapped, since taking the dual reverses the direction of arrows.
