Tuesday, 27 September 2016

Maths joke.

Spotted on the wall at my son's school:

Fibonacci numbers - as easy as 1,1,2,3..."

There's a fatal flaw in there, but maths jokes are few and far between.

My latest blogpost: Maths joke.Tweet this! Posted by Mark Wadsworth at 13:41

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10 comments:

Sackerson said...

Be warned, your numbers are dazed.

27 September 2016 at 15:50
Mark Wadsworth said...

S, hehe good one.

27 September 2016 at 21:30
paulc156 said...

Not as bad as this one...'Last night I dreamed that I was weightless! I was like, 0mg'.

Remember seeing a cartoon somewhere of two disheveled maths professors slumped underneath a chalkboard having just completed a massively long equation...exhaling cigarette smoke, [as in post coitus]. Made me smile anyway.

28 September 2016 at 11:09
Mark Wadsworth said...

PC, 0mg! Love it.

28 September 2016 at 11:58
MikeW said...

'There's a fatal flaw in there, but maths jokes are few and far between.'

No I think you are wrong.

Joke = J

It is therefore: J1,J2,J3...(dam were's that symbol?)

28 September 2016 at 12:02
Mark Wadsworth said...

PC, actually now I think about it, that joke is also fatally flawed - a mg is a measure of mass, not of weight.

MW, you have lost me. Is this the sort of joke that gets funnier every time you explain it?

28 September 2016 at 18:44
MikeW said...

Mark,

No, jokes never get funnier. And the second rule is, if you have to explain it then it is surely shit. So I will take it on the chin here. It is like your set up for the camouflage thread the other month. I could have posted. 'Yea but where is the other bit of the tank hidden'or some such. We knew what you intended: the box did indeed look like a British army paint job circa 1963.But the joke then, if you recall, was about the joke: 'where'? ie, it refers to itself. Reflexivity is the word I think?

The maths joke (fail) here was an idea that a maths bod would surely dispute straight away the idea that the class of all maths jokes is 'few and far between'. I assumed a maths bod would start with the idea that the class of all possible maths jokes was infinite, hence the J1, J2, J3... bit. I don't have infinity symbol on my keyboard. so you would never get to your list.

ok,ok, it is still a crap idea. But you win some you lose some.

28 September 2016 at 19:57
Mark Wadsworth said...

Mike, I vaguely assumed you were making the "tends to infinity" joke, so yes, we can agree the number of maths jokes tends to infinity. But the expression "few and far between" means that there are loads of other jokes (about sex, mothers in law, stupid people, racist jokes, puns etc) in between each maths joke. So if there are infinite maths jokes, there are infinity x n non-maths jokes.

An explanation which is much less funny than yours and inherently incorrect because there is no multiple of infinity.

28 September 2016 at 22:29
paulc156 said...

...but some infinities are bigger than others.
Yep 0mg is not weight, 'last night I dreamed I was massless' the more correct terminology.

29 September 2016 at 16:26
DBC Reed said...

Above> See HG Wells "The Truth about Pyecraft" = great science fiction/ clubland comedy mash-up.

4 October 2016 at 21:43

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