ProofWiki:Jokes

0.999...=1

 * Q: How many mathematicians does it take to change a lightbulb?
 * A: $0.999999 \ldots$

Banach-Tarski Paradox

 * Q: Give me an anagram of Banach-Tarski.
 * A: Banach-Tarski Banach-Tarski.

Educational Standards
Two captains of industry, Arthur and George, were in a restaurant discussing the state of educational standards, particularly in the field of mathematics. Arthur was convinced they were slipping badly, and that your average college student was completely mathematically illiterate. George, on the other hand, was confident that any student would at least know the basics of calculus.

"I bet you a hundred bucks," said Arthur, "that if you were to ask a random college student a basic question in calculus, he wouldn't understand the question, let alone furnish you with an answer."

"I'll think about that," said George. "Not sure whether to take you up on your bet or not, but I reckon you'd be wrong."

Arthur slipped off to the mens' room at that point, and while he was gone, George called over the waitress Jody. (He knew that was her name because it was written on a badge pinned to her uniform. This appears to be a custom in certain chain diners.)

"I'd like you to help settle a wager between me and my colleague," he said. "When he comes back, I'm going to call you over, and ask you a question, to which you are to answer: one third x cubed."

"Wuntur dex cue?"

"One third x cubed."

"One thurrd ex cuebd."

"That's it, one third x cubed."

"One third ... x cubed."

"That's it, perfect. There's a good tip in it for you."

Arthur returned. George said, "Yes, I think I will take you up on it. A hundred bucks says our waitress can answer such a question. Hey, Jody! What's the indefinite integral of x squared with respect to x?"

"One third x cubed," replied Jody, dutifully.

"You see?" said George, pocketing Arthur's hundred.

As Jody turned away, she called back over her shoulder, "Plus a constant."

George ruefully took Arthur's hundred back out of his pocket and dropped it onto the table.

Knot Theory

 * Student A: "What's your favourite area of mathematics?"
 * Student B: "Knot theory."
 * Student A: "Me neither."


 * -- : Knot Jokes and Pastimes (attributed to )

Circle Geometry
The roundest knight at King Arthur's round table was Sir Cumference.

He acquired his shape from too much pi.

Sufficiently Large
$1+1 = 3$, for sufficiently large values of $1$.

Why? Because $1.4 + 1.4 = 2.8$.

The result follows after rounding to the nearest integer.

Number Bases
Why do mathematicians get and  confused?

Because $\mathsf{Dec} \ 25$ equals $\mathsf{Oct} \ 31$.


 * -- : Halloween $=$ Christmas (but it's a considerably older joke than that.)

Binary
There are $10$ sorts of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don't.

Ternary
There are $10$ sorts of people in the world: those who understand ternary, those who don't, and those who thought this was going to be the binary joke.

$1$
Only dead people understand hexadecimal.

Sorry, I forgot to include you and me.

So that's: only deaf people understand hexadecimal.

$10$
There are $10$ sorts of people in the world: those who understand hexadecimal, and F the rest.

Generalised Indexing Policies
People in the world can be categorised as follows:

... from the sublime ...

 * $1$: Those who start their indexing from $1$
 * $1$: Those who start their indexing from $0$

... to the ridiculous

 * $1$: Those who can organise lists properly
 * $\text B$: Those who organise lists randomly
 * $\Omega$: Those who pretentiously use Greek letters

... and while we're about it ...
There are $2$ types of people in the world. One type can extrapolate from the available data

Average Number of Hands
Most people in the world have more than the average number of hands.

Six
The proof that $\map {\mathrm u} {x \, \mathrm u! \, s}^{-1} = 9$ is left as an exercise for the reader.

Even more Six
What happens when you rotate the above through $180^\circ$?

All Odd Numbers Are Prime
Proof by inductive argument:


 * $1$, that's prime (well not technically, but that's just mathematical double-talk).
 * $3$, that's prime.
 * $5$, that's prime.
 * $7$, that's prime.
 * $9$, that's prime (although when I measured it, it looked like it might not be - experimental error, ignore that one)
 * $11$, that's prime.
 * $13$, that's prime.

We can extrapolate from there.

Black Friday customer proof:


 * $1$, that's prime, it's obvious it is, no argument there. I said, no argument there.
 * $3$, that's prime.
 * $5$, that's prime.
 * $7$, that's prime.
 * $9$, that's prime YES IT IS -- DON'T ARGUE! YOU ARE STUPID!
 * $11$, that's prime.
 * $13$, that's prime.

Any more slackwit stupid people out there want to argue wit' me?

Logarithms
Hear about the constipated mathematician?

He worked out logs with a pencil.

Dentistry
Is a wisdom tooth a radicand?

Axiom of Intuition

 * The Axiom of Choice is obviously true; the Well Ordering Principle is obviously false; and who can tell about Zorn's Lemma?

Log Cabin

 * -- Can apparently be found in  by

Lightbulbs

 * Q: How many does it take to change a lightbulb?


 * A: Changing a is a special case of a more general theorem concerning the maintenance and repair of an . To establish upper and lower bounds for the number of personnel required, we must determine whether the sufficient conditions of Lemma $2.1$ (Availability of personnel) and those of Corollary $2.3.55$ (Motivation of personnel) apply. If these conditions are met, we derive the result by an application of the theorems in Section $3.11.23$. The resulting upper bound is, clearly, a result in an abstract measure space, in the weak-$*$ topology.


 * Q: How many lightbulbs does it take to change a lightbulb?
 * A: One, if it knows its own Gödel number.




 * Q: How many mathematicians does it take to change a lightbulb?
 * A: I don't know, but a solution exists.


 * Q: How many physicists does it take to change a lightbulb?
 * A: One, but he'll need a mathematician to help him.

Principia Mathematica

 * Lyrics: Colin Fine
 * Music: Burt Bacharach


 * What do you get if you take a set
 * Add an associative operation
 * Give it an identity, make everything invertible?
 * A-a-ah, a-a-a-a-a-a-ah, it's a group
 * A-a-a-a-ah, it's a group.


 * What do you get if you take a group
 * Add an associative operation
 * Make it distributive over the first one?
 * A-a-ah, a-a-a-a-a-a-ah, it's a ring
 * A-a-a-a-ah, it's a ring.


 * Don't tell me it's too hard for you
 * Cos I can prove it so I know it's true
 * Out of a handful of simple axioms
 * I can build mathematics to satisfaction


 * What do you get if you take a ring
 * Make the multiply commutative
 * Give a reciprocal for each non-zero element?
 * A-a-ah, a-a-a-a-a-a-ah, it's a field
 * A-a-a-a-ah, it's a field.
 * (And not a skew field either!)


 * What do you get if you take a field
 * And you take a group with a scalar multiply
 * Make it associative with the field multiply
 * A-a-ah, a-a-a-a-a-a-ah, it's a vector space
 * A-a-a-a-ah, it's a vector space.


 * You can go on like this all day
 * Building structures in this kind of way
 * You end up feeling pretty cocksure
 * When you get into categories with meta-structure!


 * What do you get with some proofs and rules
 * Some axioms to give you a formal system?
 * You try to prove that it's consistent,
 * A-a-ah, a-a-a-a-a-a-ah ...??
 * Godel's Theorem!

In prime mover's defence, he remembers meeting Colin Fine at one or two SF conventions in the 1980's. He recently found this poem, a copy of which he got hold of in approximately 1987, lurking near the bottom of a pile of old magazines.

Mathematical Double-talk

 * [Then he] proved that an automorphic resonance field has a semi-infinite number of irresolute prime ideals.
 * -- Colin Fine again, as it appears in by . The above line was the result of a specific request for an example of plausible-sounding mathematical double-talk.

Medical Conditions

 * Ring epimorphism? I had one of them once. The doctor had to give me suppositories.
 * -- Mrs. Prime.mover.

Imaginary numbers
After eating too much food, the mathematician announced: "$\sqrt {\paren {-1 / 64} }$."
 * --, via Twitter

A constant argument

 * $i$: "Be rational."
 * $\pi$: "Get real!"

Beerlogical
Three logicians walk into a pub.

The barmaid asks: "Are you all having beer?"

The first logician replies: "I don't know."

The second logician replies: "I don't know."

The third logician replies: "Yes."
 * --, via , via Twitter

More beer
$\aleph_0$ mathematicians walk into a bar. The first one orders a pint of beer. The second one orders half a pint of beer. The third orders a quarter of a pint of beer. The fourth one orders an eighth of a pint of beer. After hearing the seventh order, the barman pours two pints, and says, "You guys should know your limits."

Surreal variant
$\aleph_0$ mathematicians walk into a bar. The first orders one beer. The second one orders two beers. The third one orders three beers. The bartender stops them, says: "You guys are idiots," and pours out $-\dfrac 1 {12}$ of a beer.

Divergent variant
$\aleph_0$ mathematicians walk into a bar. The first one orders a pint of beer. The second one orders half a pint of beer. The third orders a third of a pint of beer. The fourth one orders a fourth of a pint of beer. The barman yells, "Get out of here, are you trying to ruin me?"

Culinary
What goes: $3.1415 \text{baa}$?

Shepherd's pi.

More $\pi$

 * I've memorised all the digits of pi. Now I just have to remember what order they come in.
 * -- (Traditional)

Proof by Contradiction
A mad scientist captures a mathematician and locks him in a room full of cans of food - but no can opener.

Checking on the cell several weeks later, the mathematician is lying dead, but he has written one last message on the dust on the floor:

Theorem
If I cannot open these cans of food, I will die.

Proof
Suppose not.

The Mathematicians' Party
Click on the link in the title of this section to go to the party yourself.

Optimists versus Pessimists
Consider the real interval:
 * $\mathbb I := \hointr a b$

An optimist regards $\mathbb I$ as half-open.

A pessimist regards $\mathbb I$ as half-closed.

Author Prank
I have started covering a book whose authors state:


 * "The verification that $A$ (a Ring of Idempotents, LF) becomes a Boolean ring in this way is an amusing exercise in ring axiomatics.", p.5

It's indeed most enjoyable to watch people write out $\paren {x \oplus y} \circ \paren {x \oplus y} = x \oplus y$...

Möbius Strip
I had a fight with a Möbius strip (or Möbius band for those of a prurient mentality).

I'm ashamed to say I lost. It was completely one-sided.

Amusing names
Is there an Lemma?

Psychiatry
Let $f = \ds \sum_{i \mathop = 0}^n a_i x^i$ be a polynomial.

If the polynomial coefficient $a_n$ of $f$ is $1$, then $f$ is monic

If the polynomial coefficient $a_{n - 1}$ of $f$ is $0$, then $f$ is depressed.

So, a polynomial of the form:
 * $f = x^n + a_{n-2} x^{n-2} + \cdots + a_1 x + a_0$

can be called ?

Shopological
A woman sends her logician husband to the shops. "Get me a loaf of bread," she said, "and if they have eggs, get me a dozen."

The husband returns from the shop with twelve loaves of bread.

Yes or no?
A woman has a baby, and the midwife immediately hands it to her logician husband.

"Well?" says the woman, "is it a boy or a girl?"

"Yes," he replies.

The Evils of Drink
Booze and calculus don't mix.

Don't drink and derive.

Linguistics
A visiting Professor of Linguistics was delivering a lecture.

"In the grammars of many languages throughout the world, a double negative expresses a positive. On the other hand there are some languages, such as Russian and the English of Chaucer, in which a double negative remains a negative.  However, there is not a language in the world in which a double positive can express a negative."

A voice from the back of the room piped up: "Yeah, right."


 * -- Taken from the Facebook page of on $9$th March $2014$, but has been around for considerably longer than that.

Rhetorical Questions

 * Q: What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?


 * A: Quite.

Diophantus Updated
Amanda is $21$ years older than her son John.

In $6$ years from now, Amanda will be $5$ times as old as John.


 * Question: Where is John's father?


 * Solution :

Let $M$ be the age in years of Amanda now.

Let $C$ be the age in years of John now.

Then:

So John is $-\dfrac 3 4$ years old, that is, $-9$ months.

That is, John will be born in $9$ months time.

So, right now, John's father is inside Amanda.

Fractions

 * Q: What goes: two bloody thirds?
 * A: A vulgar fraction.

Definition
An engineer, physicist and mathematician visit a farm.

The farmer gives them a challenge to enclose his sheep with the smallest amount of fence possible.

The engineer starts and makes a circle, declaring: "A circle has the greatest area compared to the circumference".

Next goes the physicist. He extends the fence infinitely far before reducing the fence, forcing the sheep next to one another before declaring "This circle is as small as it can get."

Lastly goes the mathematician, who has pondered upon it all. He builds a small fence around himself before declaring: "I define myself as on the outside."

Word Problems
Pat's first day in school:
 * Teacher: Pat, if I give you two apples, and then I give you another apple, how many apples will you have?
 * Pat: I'll have four apples, Miz.
 * Teacher: No, it's three.
 * Pat: No, Miz, I'll have four.
 * Teacher: NO Pat, two plus one equals three -- what on earth makes you think it's four?
 * Pat: I already have an apple in my lunch box.

Incompleteness
Gödel's First Incompleteness Theorem: Any effectively generated theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and.

Cauchy Condescension Test

 * It obviously converges, but I can't be bothered to explain why.

Fibonacci

 * I'm going to this year's Fibonacci convention.


 * It'll be as big as the last two put together.

It's worse than that

 * This Fibonacci joke is as bad as the last two you heard combined.

Descartes

 * A horse walks into a bar and orders a beer. The bartender asks him, "Would you like that in a glass?" The horse replies, "I think not." And POOF! he disappears.


 * Philosophy students will no doubt find this joke hilarious, because ' most famous saying was I think therefore I am. But to tell you that before the rest of the joke would be putting before the horse.

Weinberg
- Equation:
 * $p^2 + 2 p q + q^2 = 1$

Easy- Equation:
 * $p = 1$

Wives and Mistresses
An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician were talking in the pub.

"It's a disaster," said the engineer. "My wife's just found out about my mistress. And after all that calculation -- to the last decimal place -- of times and places and schedules, and she goes and reads my notebook!"

"I completely understand," replied the physicist. "My mistress just found out about my wife -- she came to my lab and found the apparatus for the industrial diamonds I manufactured for our anniversary the other month -- like a fool I'd left the die for the engraving of our names entwined in a heart, and now the cat is out of the bag."

"Dunno what you're complaining about," said the mathematician complacently. "My wife and my mistress both know all about each other."

"But doesn't that cause all sorts of problems?" exclaimed the engineer.

"Surely that's a foolish situation!" opined the physicist.

"Not at all," said the mathematician insouciantly. "When I'm not with my wife, she thinks I'm with my mistress. And when I'm not with my mistress, she thinks I'm with my wife. But in fact I'm actually in the library getting some mathematics done."

Contour Integrals
What's the value of:


 * $\ds \oint_\CC \map {\operatorname {Europe} } z \rd z$

where $\CC$ is a closed contour circling ?

By the Residue Theorem, the integral is zero. The are in.

(Comment: They're not, actually, freedom of movement within the European Community has allowed for them to move at will throughout the continent and there are indeed many Poles in Western Europe. But they can be considered removable.)

That famous chicken
Why did the chicken cross the Möbius strip?

To get to the other ... -- no, wait ...

On meticulousness
Why should I have to "dot my "i"s and cross my "t"s?

I know that $\mathbf i \cdot \mathbf i = 1$ and $\mathbf t \times \mathbf t = \mathbf 0$.


 * -- Fargle

Scottish Sheep are Black
A trainload of scientists have just crossed the border from England into Scotland. (Substitute a frontier of your choice.)

Looking out of the window, an anthropologist sees a black sheep.


 * Anthropologist: "Ooh look! Sheep in Scotland are black."


 * Logician: "Well, at least some sheep in Scotland are black."


 * Chemist: "On this occasion, we have observed that the experiment resulted in a sheep which is black. Until we have repeated the experiment in strictly controlled conditions, we cannot be certain that it will always result in a black sheep."


 * Statistician: "Oh come on! The entirety of the sample space consists of sheep which are black. It's perfectly appropriate from that to deduce that, to a considerable degree of accuracy, that all sheep in Scotland are black."


 * Physicst: "No, you're talking rubbish. At this stage, all we can tell with any certainty is that Scotland contains at least one sheep which is black."


 * Mathematician: "Now let's be strictly accurate here. What we do know is that in Scotland there exists at least one sheep, and this sheep is black on at least one side."

Height and Length
Several engineers are trying to erect a, but are having a very difficult job of it.

Their directions were to cut the pole to a certain height. However, once the pole is standing straight up, they are having a hard time cutting the pole down to the correct height, by the awkwardness of using a saw on a ladder.

A mathematician walks by and asks what they're doing. They tell her. She helpfully (and a bit condescendingly) explains that it would be much easier to cut the pole to the right size before setting it upright.

As she walks away, the engineers look at each other, annoyed.

"Figures that a mathematician wouldn't know the difference between height and length."

Animal Crackers
All the animals in the zoo boarded a flight one day, in order to go on safari.

As they settled themselves down, the drinks and the drugs were broken out, and gradually, practically everybody on that flight was more or less inebriated, the worse for wear, stoned, out of it, off their box, and whatever other glorious euphemisms you care to use.

The elephants had imbibed more beer than would completely inundate a sizeable village; the monkeys were off their nuts on weed, the snakes were utterly plastered on whisky, and the giraffes were falling down on the vast quantities of wine they had guzzled.

All, that is, except for the King of the Jungle.

The head stewardess, who was having trouble keeping her passengers under control, approached him, saying:

"It's jolly nice that at least one of you has stayed sober. Maybe you can help keep order."

"Well ma'am," he replied, "it's very important that I do stay sober and clear-headed if we are to make it to our destination in the most efficient manner.

"You see," he continued, "the shortest distance between two points is taken by the straight lion in the plane."


 * --, $2$ March $2019$

Religious
Young Herbert was failing in mathematics, and his parents did not know what to do with him.

They had heard that Catholic schools imposed some proper discipline upon the pupils, so (despite having no spiritual leanings in that direction) they sent Herbert there.

Surprisingly enough, he had been there only a matter of weeks when it was noticed that he had seriously started to apply himself, and his grades dramatically improved.

Taking his son out on a fishing trip as a reward, Herbert's father mentioned this increase in performance, and congratulated him.

"Well Dad," said Herbert, "it's like this. When I saw the guy nailed to the plus sign, I knew they meant business."

Form Follows Function
Form follows function, did you say?

Not in my dictionary it doesn't.

The perpetrator of this joke should be charged

 * "Oh, no!" said one atom to the other. "I've lost one of my electrons!"


 * "Are you sure?" said the other atom.


 * "Yes, I'm positive!"

's lecture tour
Some years ago, did a lecture tour ranging over the whole of the United States.

It was a long tour, and he presented the same lecture every night.

In fact, it was such a long tour that his driver said to him, "Do you know, I've seen you present this lecture so often, I reckon I could do it myself."

"Go on then, said Albert, always game for a laugh.

So indeed, this is what happened.

Instead of Albert Einstein presenting the lecture, that evening his driver presented it for him.

And he presented it absolutely flawlessly, and received a hearty round of applause at the end.

But then one of the members of the audience asked a question.

It was a big and complicated question, requiring a deep and thorough understanding of quantum mechanics for it to be answered adequately.

But the driver was completely unfazed.

He replied, "The question you have asked is so elementary, and has such an obvious answer, that ..." (pointing at Albert Einstein) "... even my driver can answer it."

Affirming the Consequent
A professor of logic says, "Class, if you know what 'affirming the consequent' means, then raise your hand."

A student raises her hand.

The professor says, "You know what it means?"

She replies, "No, why would you think I do?"

Even More Beer
Dedekind infinite bottles of beer on the wall,

Dedekind infinite bottles of beer,

Take one down, and pass it around,

Dedekind infinite bottles of beer on the wall.

Proof by Triviality
"It trivially follows that $P \ne NP$."

Proof by Example
"Thus $\powerset S$ is strictly larger than $S$ as is seen in the example $S=\{0,1\}$."

Proof by Exercise
"The proof is left as a trivial exercise for the reader."

Proof by Non-Existent Citation
"For the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, see Fermat's commentary on Arithmetica."

Proof by Margin Size
"This theorem has a truly marvelous proof which this margin is too narrow to contain."

Proof by Authority
"Fermat said that this theorem is true, and who are we to argue?"

Proof by Reduction to Wrong Problem
"To see that $P \ne NP$, we simply reduce to the Chinese Remainder Theorem."

Proof by Generalization in the Obvious Way
"To prove Fermat's Last Theorem, we simply generalize his proof of the $n=4$ case in the obvious way."

Proof by Lack of Counterexample
"Computer programs haven't found a counter example all the way to $n=3,000,000$, so it must hold for all $n$."

Proof by Simple Corollary
"Thus there is no surjection from $S$ to $\powerset S$. The Continuum Hypothesis follows as a simple corollary."

Proof by Ontological Argument
"The greatest proof that ZF implies Choice exists in the mind. If it didn't exist in reality then a greater proof would exist, a contradiction. Thus, the greatest proof of ZF implying Choice exists in reality."

Proof by Gruesome Predicate
"Let '$x$ is griemann' mean '$x$ is green if first observed before January 1, 3000, and the Riemann Hypothesis is true if first observed after'. All emeralds thus far observed have been griemann, as they have been green and observed before January 1, 3000. By philosophical induction, all emeralds observed in the future will be griemann. Thus, after January 1, 3000, the Riemann Hypothesis will hold."

Proof by Curry's Paradox
"Observe the argument 'This argument is valid, therefore $P \ne NP$.' Assume for contradiction that the argument is invalid. Then its premise is false, making the argument valid. Thus the argument is valid. Since its premise is true, and it is valid, its conclusion must also be true. Therefore $P \ne NP$."

Proof by Inspection
"Upon simple inspection, one sees that the Continuum Hypothesis holds."

Proof by Conjecture
"Let us make the following bold conjecture: $P \ne NP$."

Proof by Conjecture Reference
"It has been boldly conjectured that $P \ne NP$."

Proof by Recollection
"Recall the proof for the Riemann Hypothesis previously elaborated."

Proof by Being an Engineer
"As this is an engineering class, we will leave it to the mathematicians to prove that this function is differentiable."

Proof by Thwarting Satan
"Any doubts that you have about this theorem are just the work of Satan. We must stay strong in our belief of a proof."

Proof by Inter-Universal Teichmuller Theory
"It is a trivial implication of these papers that the abc conjecture holds."

Proof by Publishing in Your Own Journal
"The result must be true. It was published in a journal of which I am chief editor."

Proof by Terrence Tao
"Terrence Tao is working on a proof, so while a proof is presently unknown, we trust that we will have one soon."

Proof by Assuming the Necessary Assumptions
"Assuming the necessary assumptions, it follows that the function is differentiable."