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The story behind the Connecticut deli math sign
- glorious 9y agotl;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.
- dEnigma 9y agoOne 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
- MrZongle2 9y agoThank you; you beat me to posting the TLDR. The sign is humorous, but the article is entirely too long for the subject.
- jcburns 9y agoIronically, the linked piece says "This interview has been edited for length and clarity." Maybe they made it longer and more obscure?
- waqf 9y agoOk, in future please refrain from ordering sandwiches while standing in the math line.
- daly 9y agoSadly Dave's Sandwich was not a Ham Sandwich, said the topolgist.
- madfriend 9y agoI wish I read this tldr earlier. I spent 7 minutes scanning this boring interview for an explanation without success.
- kmill 9y agoI think it's a little funnier than your tl;dr: in particular, a member of the math faculty, who has a sandwich named after him and who is friends with the owner, was a little bit too preoccupied with mathematics to fully engage with the sandwich ordering process.
- daly 9y agoLet L be a group. I actually guffawed at that one. I am SO going to use that.
- striking 9y agoI still don't get it. :/
- throwawayjava 9y agoTypically, you'd use G when picking a variable name for a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_(mathematics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_(mathematics) The equivalent programmer joke might be something like "int str;" or "string array_length;" It's kind of funny in the "oh that's a really bad joke" kind of way :)
- waqf 9y ago"Let ε<0." Or a similar but more blatant telling of the original joke would be "Let ℵ₀ be a group."
- magoghm 9y ago"Let ε<0." There goes the neighborhood!
- keithpeter 9y agoExcellent. Thankyou very much. I teach basic Maths to adults in the UK, so I tend to use these old faves... "What did the zero say to the eight?" "Nice belt" (even my sister has heard that one) "Why does noone talk to circles?" "There's no point" Thankyou and goodnight
- mcguire 9y agoWhy is six afraid of seven? Because seven eight nine. Never grep a yacc by the inode.
- Analemma_ 9y agoMathematicians 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.
- satsuma 9y agoI feel like they should count for less points in Nerd Sniping. https://xkcd.com/356/ https://xkcd.com/356/
- waqf 9y agoBut how many points in grammar trolling?
- projectramo 9y agoDoes 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.
- Avshalom 9y agohttps://www.xkcd.com/221/ https://www.xkcd.com/221/
- jdmichal 9y agoAlso: http://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25 http://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25
- sp332 9y agoThis actually has a bit of a point behind it, because the digits of Pi http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/~huberty/math5337/groupe/digits.html http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/~huberty/math5337/groupe/digits.htm... 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
- sloppycee 9y agoIs that a reference to the hilariously broken PS3 RNG? For those unaware, the PS3 was jailbroken because their RNG always returned 4.
- okket 9y agoThe self-inflicted degradation of the random number generator in the Debian OpenSSL packages were the main inspiration for this, I think. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_number_generator_attack#Debian_OpenSSL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_number_generator_attack...
- pjc50 9y agoThe 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.
- kgwgk 9y ago"What's yellow, normed, and complete?" "A Bananach space."
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- waqf 9y agoYou still missed one, because there are four canonical math fruit jokes: http://www.stoneswww.academickids.com/encyclopedia/index.php/User:AlexG#Mathematical_Fruit_Jokes http://www.stoneswww.academickids.com/encyclopedia/index.php...
- ilyagr 9y agoMy favorite math joke, imagine a professor speaking: "I explained it in my seminar, but they didn't seem to understand. So, I had to explain it again, and again they didn't get it. I ended up explaining it a third time, and by that point I understood it, but they still didn't understand. Many more jokes of varies quality: https://mathoverflow.net/questions/1083/do-good-math-jokes-exist https://mathoverflow.net/questions/1083/do-good-math-jokes-e...
- kps 9y agoFor those wondering, the deli is 5370 km from Reading.
- rocky1138 9y agoCBC asking the real questions
- tezka 9y agoI love math but I find this whole article and the associated jokes pretty contentless and somewhat boring.
- keithpeter 9y agoI think it is one of those local situations where you have to know the people involved and go to the same cafe &c. In jokes basically.
- pwdisswordfish 9y agoHere are a few better ones: https://mathoverflow.net/questions/1083/do-good-math-jokes-exist https://mathoverflow.net/questions/1083/do-good-math-jokes-e...
- boxerab 9y agoworld's shortest math joke: For any epsilon less than zero .....
- throwawaymanbot 9y agoThis thread might have been more interesting if it had of read Connecticut deli meth sign.