
The story behind the Connecticut deli math sign - okket
http://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-monday-edition-1.4167415/the-story-behind-that-connecticut-deli-math-sign-1.4169424
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projectramo
Does anyone remember the story about the famous mathematician at (I think)
Princeton, who would always pick 3 as a random number in his examples. ("Let's
pick a random number, say 3...")

And then he ended up mentoring an entire generation of mathematicians who
adopted his habit.

And everyone would always "randomly" pick 3. It became a thing.

It's kind of a variant on the "let L be a group" because the joke relies
entirely on the social conventions of a small group of people.

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Avshalom
[https://www.xkcd.com/221/](https://www.xkcd.com/221/)

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jdmichal
Also:
[http://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25](http://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25)

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sp332
This actually has a bit of a point behind it, because the digits of Pi
[http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/~huberty/math5337/groupe/digits.htm...](http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/~huberty/math5337/groupe/digits.html)
feature "999999" much earlier than would be expected if the digits were
uniformly distributed. So once that sequence was discovered, it took a lot
more work for mathematicians to convince themselves that it is completely
"random" (or "normal" in the jargon). It still hasn't been proven though!
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi#Irrationality_and_normality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi#Irrationality_and_normality)

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tezka
I love math but I find this whole article and the associated jokes pretty
contentless and somewhat boring.

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pwdisswordfish
Here are a few better ones:

[https://mathoverflow.net/questions/1083/do-good-math-
jokes-e...](https://mathoverflow.net/questions/1083/do-good-math-jokes-exist)

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Analemma_
Mathematicians can have a focus (and corresponding lack of real-world
awareness) that puts even us engineers to shame. Once as an undergrad I was
taking a class in the math building, and there was a professor blocking the
door because he was reading a flyer taped to it about an upcoming symposium or
something. I coughed a little to indicate I was there, and he turned,
acknowledged my presence, and then went right back to reading the flyer for
another fifteen seconds or so.

We love you, you crazy bastards.

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semi-extrinsic
There's the classic/apocryphal story as well of the student who stops a math
professor in the hallway and asks a complicated question. Professor gives a
long, thorough answer, and the student becomes enlightened. Just as the
student is about to leave, the professor asks "Wait, which way did I come
from?" Student points out "That way", and the professor goes "Great, then I've
had lunch."

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btowngar
Norbert Wiener, the MIT professor, is generally the source of many of these
(probably somewhat apocryphal) stories of 'absent minded professors'.

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pjc50
The two maths jokes that I can remember from my undergrad days are:

"What's purple and commutes?" "An abelian grape"

"What's yellow and equivalent to the axiom of choice?" "Zorn's Lemon"

Evidently there's something inherently funny about group theory.

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kgwgk
"What's yellow, normed, and complete?" "A Bananach space."

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waqf
You still missed one, because there are four canonical math fruit jokes:
[http://www.stoneswww.academickids.com/encyclopedia/index.php...](http://www.stoneswww.academickids.com/encyclopedia/index.php/User:AlexG#Mathematical_Fruit_Jokes)

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daly
Let L be a group.

I actually guffawed at that one. I am SO going to use that.

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qubex
Isn't SO a special orthogonal group, as in the rotational symmetries? Are we
in the presence of a really obscure pun?

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throwawayjava
Can someone think of a way to recover the liar's paradox from statements about
L being a group?

Because then we can just let L be a Lie(ing) group :)

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throwawaymanbot
This thread might have been more interesting if it had of read Connecticut
deli meth sign.

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kps
For those wondering, the deli is 5370 km from Reading.

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boxerab
world's shortest math joke:

For any epsilon less than zero .....

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glorious
tl;dr: They were down there talking about math one afternoon and the owner of
the deli was trying to take the order from one of them and he was a little bit
too preoccupied with mathematics to fully engage in the sandwich ordering
process.

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dEnigma
One actually doesn't have to read more than this tl;dr, since the interview in
the article is tedious and takes forever to get to the point

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echion
And the joke is buried at the end!

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lisper
And it isn't a very good joke.

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mcguire
That's the best kind.

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rocky1138
CBC asking the real questions

