ProofWiki:Jokes/Physicist Mathematician and Engineer Jokes

The Red Rubber Ball
A physicist, mathematician and engineer were asked to determine the volume of a red rubber ball.

The physicist filled a beaker with water, immersed the ball, caught the runoff and measured its volume.

The mathematician set up and solved an appropriate triple integral, then measured the diameter of the ball and plugged in the number.

The engineer looked around on his bookshelf, then asked, "Has anyone got a red rubber ball volume table? I've only got the ones for blue and purple."

N-Dimensional Space
A mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer attend a lecture on Minkowski space.

Getting frustrated, the engineer asks, "How do you visualize 4-dimensional space?"

"Easy," replies the physicist. "Just imagine that each point of $\R$, representing a point in time, is associated with its own 3d space."

"There's an easier way," says the mathematician. "Just imagine N-dimensional space and set $N=4$."

Trivial Joke
An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician find themselves in a joke.

After consulting his slide ruler and TI-84 calculator, the engineer realizes the situation and starts laughing.

The physicist then understands too and chuckles to himself happily, as he now has enough experimental evidence to publish a paper.

The mathematician is perplexed, as he had observed right away that he was the subject of a joke, and deduced the presence of humor from similar jokes, but considered this joke to be too trivial a corollary to be significant, let alone funny.

Experimental Equations
After running many empirical tests, a physicist works out a set of equations explaining the data.

He asks a mathematician to check them.

A week later, the mathematician calls and says, "I've checked, and your equations are nonsense."

"But these equations accurately explain the data from my experiments. Are you sure that they are complete nonsense?"

"Well they aren't complete nonsense, but the only case in which they have solutions is the trivial one where the field is Archimedean."