Subject: Math Humor
Date: Sat, Dec 30 2000 00:00:02 EST
Heather Engle has just finished tearing out her hair over the past three
days (relax, Heather: the convention is over), so I decided to celebrate
with some humor she sent...
A sine curve goes off to infinity or at least the end of the blackboard
-- Prof. Steiner
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house.
-- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love"
"This isn't right. This isn't even wrong."
-- Wolfgang Pauli
Once upon a time, when I was training to be a mathematician, a group of
us bright young students taking number theory discovered the names of
the smaller prime numbers.
- 2: The Odd Prime --
- It's the only even prime, therefore is odd. QED.
- 3: The True Prime --
- Lewis Carroll: "If I tell you 3 times, it's true."
- 31: The Arbitrary Prime --
- Determined by unanimous unvote. We needed an arbitrary prime
in case the prof asked for one, and so had an election. 91
received the most votes (well, it *looks* prime) and 3+4i the
next most. However, 31 was the only candidate to receive none
at all.
Since the composite numbers are formed from primes, their qualities are
derived from those primes. So, for instance, the number 6 is "odd but
true", while the powers of 2 are all extremely odd numbers.