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Mu

    Every one of these jokes are taken from the book Comic Sections by Desmond MacHale.

    This is for two reasons

  • it is a wonderful book that every mathematician should read;

  • it contains all the mathematical jokes that I've ever heard.

     

  1. A mathematician, an engineer, a statistician and a politician were all asked what 2 + 2 was. The mathematician said that it all depended on what number base you were using. The engineer said it was 4. The statistician said he was 95% confident that the answer lay between 3.95 and 4.05. The politician said, "What would you like it to be?"

  2. A recent report from the Association for the Promotion of Statistics states that this year meaningless statistics were up 4.29% on last year's figures.

  3. Q. What is a kittegory? A. A small category

  4. Student Howler 1: An average is a thing that hens lay their eggs on - for example, "My hens lay four eggs a week on average."

  5. An international competition was held to discover the world's most useless number. The winner was 1.8015446 × 1012, which claims to be the speed of light in furlongs per fortnight.

  6. Student Howler 2: 90º is the boiling-point of a right-angled triangle.

  7. The student law of universal cancellation: If the same symbol x occurs in any two different places on the one page it may be cancelled.

  8. There are three kinds of mathematicians - those who can count and those who can't.

  9. A physicist once proved that every odd number is prime. He cited 1, 3, 5 and 7. He had some trouble with 9, but on proceeding, he discovered that the pattern held for 11 and 13. Finally, he put 9 down to experimental error. (You'll find an extended version of this joke at Prime Scientist Joke).

  10. Mathematicians are renowned for their inability to add up or take away, in much the same way as geographers are always getting lost, and economists are always borrowing off you. Never play darts with a mathematician. - Robert Ainsley

    You will find lots of cartoons at Bamdad's Maths Comics and more jokes at Mathematical jokes, and Profession Jokes - Mathematicicans

    Mathematics teachers and lecturers may find Evolution of Math Teaching highly amusing. A French version of this appeared in The Mathematical Gazette in November 1998.

    There's an amusing guide to teaching mathematics at A GUIDE FOR TEACHING MATHEMATICS: Part I and Part II.

     

 

Steve Mayer

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