Tanya Khovanova's Math Blog

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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.

I just compared two searches on Google Trends:

• How to become a vampire is in blue.
• How to become a mathematician is in red.

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Grigori Perelman’s theorem: There is no offer you can’t refuse.

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A conversation between two Russians:
— Run to the store and fetch a couple bottles of vodka.
— How much is a couple?
— Seven.

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— Is it true that the Windows operating system was copied from a UFO computer that crashed in Roswell?
— All we know for sure is that the UFO that didn’t crash had a different operating system.

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I saw our system administrator’s shopping list. The first line was tomatoes.zip for ketchup.

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Right clicking a file with a mouse will allow you to change it, check it for viruses, or revert to the previous version. I wonder where I can buy a mouse that can do the same thing with my husband.

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— Let’s have sex.
— Sure, but today I want to be the numerator.

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Attention! We want to check that you are not a robot. Please, undress and turn on a web-camera.

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In a drug store:
— I would like input and output cleaners.
— ???
— Toothpaste and toilet paper.

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I used to recount the multiplication tables to delay my ejaculation. Now, each time I see the multiplication tables I get a hard on.

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— Tonight my parents are away. Let’s finally try a forbidden thing.
— Dividing by zero?

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My friend put his mistress in his phone’s contact list as ‘low battery’.