"All I ask of my body is that it carry around my head."
-- Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931)
An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician find themselves in an anecdote, indeed an anecdote quite similar to many that you have no doubt already heard. After some observations and rough calculations the engineer realizes the situation and starts laughing. A few minutes later the physicist understands too and chuckles to himself happily as he now has enough experimental evidence to publish a paper. This leaves the mathematician somewhat perplexed, as he had observed right away that he was the subject of an anecdote, and deduced quite rapidly the presence of humour from similar anecdotes, but considers this anecdote to be too trivial a corollary to be significant, let alone funny.
A physical fellow named Fisk
Could screw at a rate very brisk.
So fast was his action
The Fitzgerald contraction
Would shrink up his rod to a disk.
A mathematician named Boris
Had a wife with a wonderful clitoris.
He charged a small fee
For his colleagues to see
That it was made in the shape of a torus.
A mathematician named Hall
Has a hexahedronical ball,
And the cube of its weight
Times his pecker's, plus eight
Is his phone number -- give him a call..
A mathematician named Klein
Thought the Mobius band was divine.
Said he, "If you glue
The edges of two,
You'll get a weird bottle like mine!
All that glitters has a high refractive index.
All such expressions as SQRT(-1), SQRT(-2) ... are neither
nothing, nor greater than nothing, nor less than nothing, which
necessarily constitutes them imaginary or impossible.
-- L. Euler
All scientific discoveries are first recorded on napkins or tablecloths. Engineering advances are drawn inside matchbook covers. Keep supplies of them handy at all times.
Aleph-null bottles of beer on the wall,
Aleph-null bottles of beer,
You take one down, and pass it around,
Aleph-null bottles of beer on the wall.
Actually, the probability is 100% that the elevator will be
going in the right direction. Proof by induction:
N=1. Trivialy true, since both you and the elevator only have
one floor to go to.
Assume true for N, prove for N+1:
If you are on any of the first N floors, then it is true by the
induction hypothesis. If you are on the N+1st floor, then both
you and the elevator have only one choice, namely down. Therefore,
it is true for all N+1 floors.
QED.
Let all my elements be canceled, then,
Transposed, negated, cast to vector space,
Destroyed from 1 to m and 1 to n,
With 0 my determinant and trace;
And yet, immutable, this shall remain
The last summation o'er my indices:
A mapping with unbounded codomain
To bind us two as inverse matrices.
Let Hamilton and Cayley calculate
Some other who might be inverse to me--
Legitimate, but an imperfect mate;
Ours is the only true identity.
My rows and columns would commute with thee,
Linearly dependent to infinity.
--- ( #endStanislawLem)
'2B or not 2B that is FF.'
-- Tom Clancy
"Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be
true."
-- Niels Bohr (1885-1962) to a young physicist
The reason computer chips are so small is computers don't eat much.
Klein bottle for sale. Inquire within.
Anybody who cannot comprehend mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wash, cook food, and not make messes on the floor. -- Heinlein, in a book
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents
and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents
eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar
with it.
-- Max Planck
"Square root / Cube root / Log of pi / Disintegrate 'em
/ RPI!"
--- Rensaeller Polytechnic Institute's football cheer
"Science is not a sacred cow. Science is a horse. Don't
worship it. Feed it."
-- Aubrey Eben
It was mentioned on CNN that the new prime number discovered
recently is exactly four times bigger than the previous record.
--- john@rtfm.mlb.fl.us (John Blasik) in rec.humor.funny
Now where did I park my hard drive?
Recursive, adj.; see 'Recursive'
Start a download. Get a beer. Multitasking.
My computer's sick and I think my modem is a carrier
"I bought an internal modem, but I can't swallow it."
Calm down. It's only ones and zeros.
Electrical Engineers do it with less resistance.
Mathematicians take it to the limit.
Polymer Chemists do it in chains.
Chemists get reactions.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
It's 5:50 a.m., Do you know where your stack pointer is?
FF Buckets of bits on the bus, FF buckets of bits, Take one down and short it to ground, FE buckets of bits.
Shift to the left! Shift to the Right! Pop up, Push down, Byte Byte Byte!
One hundred hairy bugs in the code, one hundred hairy bugs....Fix one bug, compile it again, 101 hairy bugs. Repeat until BUGS = 0.
To iterate is human, to recurse divine.
Hello. My $NAME is ~inigo-montoya. You killed my process. Prepare to vi (The Unix's Bride)
To err is human. To really fuck up takes root privs.
I'm sorry, but the number you have dialed is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
Irrationality is the square root of all evil.
Mathematician: A machine for converting coffee into theorems.
Planets are smarter than astronomers because planets can solve the three - body problem.
/earth is 98% full, please delete anyone you can.
Last Modified: May 5th, 1998
Patri Friedman / patri@izzy.com