Thursday, September 03, 2009

Mathematicians and black sheep

There are a relatively small number of mathematical jokes. There's the one that ends "he worked it out using pencil and paper" and the one ending "Consider a spherical cow", but that's where my supply dries up.

Until I read a third one over on Never Trust a Hippy ...

An astronomer, biologist, an engineer and a mathematician were crossing the border into Scotland from England on a train when they saw a field with a black sheep in it.

The astronomer said, "Look--all sheep on Earth are black."

The biologist said, "Look, in Scotland the sheep are black."

The engineer replied, "No, in Scotland some of the sheep are black."

The mathematician rolled his eyes to heaven and said, very patiently, "In Scotland, there exists at least one field, in which there is at least one sheep which is black on at least one side."

Updated with a link to the Spherical Cow wikipedia entry ... thanks to Ryan for pointing that out.

4 comments:

ryangadams said...

ok, here's an astrophysics joke for you:

A spiral galaxy walks into a bar and orders a drink. The barman says "Get out, you’re barred"

A quick trawl of the web brings back lots of astronomy jokes, not many of them funny, and sadly none poking fun at the other, lesser sciences.

Alan in Belfast (Alan Meban) said...

A quick link to wiki's entry on barred spiral galaxies for anyone else who fell asleep in AstroPhysics 101!

Coke_Shy_Hero said...

The flood waters recede and Noah drops anchor on the Ark. Opening the door and releasing the animals, he exhorts them "Go forth and multiply!". Soon after this pair of snakes come up to Noah and say "But we can't multiply... we're only adders!"

(and it's not finished there, folks!)

So, Noah tells them "Wait here, I can sort this out for you." and he goes off and gets a few largish tree trunks and an axe. "What are you doing?" enquire the snakes...

Noah says, "I will build for you... a table of logs!"

Anonymous said...

Don't forget this classic ...

An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first one orders a beer. The second orders half a beer. The third, a quarter of a beer. The bartender says “You’re all idiots” and pours two beers.