Tanya Khovanova's Math Blog

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Do you know a statistics joke?
Probably, but it’s mean!

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Twelve different world statisticians studied Russian roulette. Ten of them proved that it is perfectly safe. The other two scientists were unfortunately not able to join the final discussion.

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A statistician bought a new tool that finds correlations between different fields in databases. Hoping for new discoveries he ran his new tool on his large database and found highly correlated events. These are his discoveries:

• The most correlated fields were the title and the gender. If the title is Mr., then the gender is male.
• The children have the same last names as parents.
• The children are much younger than the parents.
• The main cause of divorces is weddings.

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Scientists discovered that the main cause of living ’till old age is an error on the birth certificate.

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Scientists concluded that children do not really use the Internet. This is proven by the fact that the percentage of people saying ‘No’ when asked ‘Are you over 18?’ is close to zero.

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— Please, close the window, it is cold outside.
— Do you think it will get warmer, after I close it?

It is time to report on my weight loss progress. Unfortunately, the report is very boring; I am still stuck at the same weight: 225. What can I do? Let’s laugh about it. Here are some jokes on the subject.

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After the holidays I stepped on my scale. After an hour I tried again and had a revelation: tears weigh nothing!

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I am on a miracle diet: I eat everything and hope for a miracle.

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Ideas to lose weight: A glass of water three days before your meal.

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I wanted to lose five pounds by this summer, now I have only ten pounds to lose to reach my goal.

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A button of unknown functionality should be pressed an even number of times.

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When I tell you that I am closer to 30 than to 20, I mean to tell you that I am 42.

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If a car with a student-driver sign gets its windshield wipers turned on, then the car is about to turn.

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I always learn from the mistakes of people who followed my advice.

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A traffic policeman stops a car:
—You’re going 70 in a 35 miles-per-hour zone.
—But there are two of us!

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The most popular tweet, “Live your life so that you do not have time for social networks.”

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A mathematical tragedy: two parallel lines fall in love.

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Life is not fair, even among gadgets: the desktop misbehaves, the monitor gets smacked.

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An amazing magic trick! Think of a number, add 5 to it, then subtract 5. The result is the number you thought of!

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—How can you distinguish a mathematician from a physicist?
—Ask for an antonym for the word parallel.
—And?
—A mathematician will answer perpendicular, and a physicist serial.

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—How can you distinguish a physicist from a mathematician?
—Ask the person to walk around a post.
—And?
—A physicist will ask why, and a mathematician clockwise or counter-clockwise?

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—Some bike thief managed to open my combination lock. How could they possibly guess that the combo was the year of the canonization of Saint Dominic by Pope Gregory IX at Rieti, Italy?
—What year was that?
—1234.

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—Hello? Is this the anonymous FBI tip-line?
—Yes, Mr. Benson.

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—My five-year-old son knows the first 20 digits of Pi.
—Wow!
— I use it as the password on my laptop, where I keep all the games.

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I learned three things in school: how to rite and how to count.

Whenever I am under stress, I turn to jokes. My recent problems with spam attacks on my blog led me to surf the web for new math jokes. Here are some of my recent translations from Russian.

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Two is the same thing as eight, to some degree.

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A girl to her mathematician boyfriend:
— Let’s do something that is forbidden tonight.
— Divide by zero?

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If thoughts converge, they are bounded.

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A mathematician’s son:
— Dad, how do I write the number 8?
— That’s easy: rotate the infinity symbol by pi over 2.

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My student couldn’t take an integral from my book. So he took the book together with all the integrals there.

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Archimedes, Pascal and Newton play hide and seek. Archimedes is the seeker. Pascal hides, but Newton draws a 1-meter square around himself. Archimedes opens his eyes and shouts:
— I see Newton!
— Oh, no! One newton per square meter is the pascal.

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What a pleasure to smoke an e-cigarette after cybersex…

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Russians were the first in the world to create a computer program that passes the Turing test. Scientists tested the program using several Russians with a variety of questions, and each time the program gave the same answer as the people. The reply to every question was, “Go f*ck yourself!”

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There are two types of people: those who know nothing about fractals and those who think that there are two types of people: those who know nothing about fractals and those who think that there are two types people…

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—Describe yourself in three words.
—Lazy.

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Internet forum:
—Tell me about yourself.
—I am lazy and I like to eat.
—Tell me some more.
—I am tired of typing. I’ll go grab a snack.

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—Why do you want to divorce your wife?
—She nags too much. For the last half six month, she’s been bugging me everyday to throw away the Christmas tree.

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Yesterday I realized that I’m not the laziest person in the world. I saw my neighbor walking the dog on a leash through his window.

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The list of symptoms of laziness:
1)

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—Honey, have you blocked our computer?
—Yes.
—What’s the password?
—Our wedding date.
—%?#!!

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—What’s the pin on our card?
—We’re on a public chat, honey. Why don’t I sms it?
—But I forgot my phone. Please tell me, cupcake!
—Okay. By digit: the second digit of our apartment number, the fourth digit of your phone number, the month of my birthday, and the number of our children.
—Got it. How clever! 8342, right?

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—Where is the report?
—We are stuck. The tech people took our monitor with passwords.
—What!?!
—Our monitor got broken so the techs took it for repair. Our passwords were written on the stand.

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A Roman walks into a bar, holds up two fingers, and says, “Five beers, please.”

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To understand what a recursion is, you must first understand recursion.

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A guy is complaining to his mathematician friend:
— I have a problem. I have difficulty waking up in the morning.
— Logically, counting sheep backwards should help.

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— Can I ask you a question?
— You can, but you have already just done that.
— Darn, what about two questions?
— You can, but that was your second question.

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The Internet ethics committee worked hard to generate a list of words that should never be used on the Internet. The problem is, now they can’t post it.

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Quantum entanglement of a pair of socks: As soon as one is designated as the left, the other instantly becomes the right.

I collect geeky jokes. I think I’ve heard most of them. So I was surprised to stumble upon a website with many new ones: 50 People On ‘The Most Intellectual Joke I Know’. These are some of them:

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Q: What does the “B” in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for?
A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot.

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Entropy isn’t what it used to be.

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There are two types of people in the world: those who can extrapolate from incomplete data sets

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This sentence contains exactly threee erors.

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There’s a band called 1023MB. They haven’t had any gigs yet.

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A logician’s wife is having a baby. The doctor immediately hands the newborn to the dad. His wife asks impatiently, “So, is it a boy or a girl”? The logician replies, “Yes.”

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The barman says, “We don’t serve time travelers in here.”
A time traveler walks into a bar.

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The first rule of Tautology club, is the first rule of Tautology club.

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A woman walks in on her husband, a string theorist, in bed with another woman. He shouts, “I can explain everything!”

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What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?

I gave the following puzzle from Raymond Smullyan’s book What is the Name of this Book? to my AMSA students.

What happens if an irresistible cannonball hits an immovable post?

This puzzle is known as the Irresistible Force Paradox. The standard answer is that the given conditions are contradictory and the two objects cannot exist at the same time.

My AMSA student gave me a much cuter answer: The post falls in love with the cannonball as it is so irresistible.