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Forum: Math Humor
Welcome to the Math Humor forum!
The zingiest of zingers...

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jump to page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 >> of 13 (64 items)

A mathematician,a physicist & an engineer... by Valor1718 on 2009-11-06 00:06:22
A mathematician, a physicist and an engineer went to the races and laid their money down. Commiserating in the bar after the race, the engineer says, "I don't understand why I lost all my money. I measured all the horses and calculated their strength and mechanical advantage and figured out how fast they could run..."

The physicist interrupted him: "...but you didn't take individual variations into account. I did a statistical analysis of their previous performances and bet on the horses with the highest probability of winning..."

"...so if you're so hot why are you broke?" asked the engineer. But before the argument can grow, the mathematician takes out his pipe and they get a glimpse of his well-fattened wallet. Obviously here was a man who knows something about horses. They both demanded to know his secret.

"Well," he says, "first I assumed all the horses were identical and spherical..." 
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'''Theorem.''' Numbers Eventually Get Even by Jon Awbrey on 2008-12-03 11:23:05
Demon-Strandum. Reckoning that 2 is even, 4 is doubly even, 8 is triply even, and so on, prove that numbers eventually get even.
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Socrates's math is difficult to follow. by Silentvoice on 2008-10-26 22:44:23
Socrates was apparently a genius mathematician, in his lifetime he created a mathematical model for pleasantness of a life.

Quote from Plato's "Republic" (slightly abridged)

Glaucon: "Do you know how much more unpleasant a tyrant's life is than a king's?"

Socrates: "I will if you let me. There are, it seems, three pleasures, one genuine, and two illegitimate and a tyrant is at the extreme end of the illegitimate ones. But it isn't easy, all the same, to say just how inferior he is to a king, except to say that a tyrant is somehow third from an oligarch"

Glaucon: "Yes."

Socrates: "So a tyrant is three times three times removed from true pleasure"

Glaucon: "Apparently so."

Socrates: "It seems then, on the basis of the magnitude of its number, that the image of tyrannical pleasure is a plane figure"

Glaucon: "Exactly"

Socrates: "But then it's clear that, by squaring and cubing it, we'll discover how far a tyrant's pleasure is from that of a king"

Glaucon: "It's clear to a mathematician, at any rate"

Socrates: "Then, turning it the other way around, if someone wants to say how far a king's pleasure is from a tyrant's he'll find, if he completes the calculation, that a king lives seven hundred and twenty-nine times more pleasantly than a tyrant and that a tyrant is the same number of times more wretched."




I got a good kick out of this whole passage when reading it for a greek philosophy class. My final paper is on the influence of mathematics on Plato and Aristotle, and vice-versa.
[ reply | up ]
How to build a Houseboat by stafma31 on 2008-05-06 00:01:58
Integral (1/cabin) d(cabin)= natural log cabin + C = houseboat
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How to build a Houseboat by stafma31 on 2008-05-05 23:59:03
∫(1/cabin) d(cabin)= log cabin + C = houseboat
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