An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar
November18
An infinite number of mathematicians walks into a bar. The first one orders a beer. The second one orders half a beer. The third one orders a quarter of a beer. It continues that way until the bartender interrupts to say, “You are all a bunch of idiots,” and pours two beers.
My wife is a mathematician. This made me laugh. Your mileage may vary. I stole the joke from here.
Errrr, care to explain why this is funny?
It’s a generous bartender. He offer to them 1/2^100 of a beer to them…
Humor that has to be explained is either not funny, or something is being missed. Hopefully, this will help those who don’t get the joke to at least see why it made me chuckle, rather than prove my sense of humor to be hopelessly warped.
Remember studying limits and such in calculus, and eventually someone in the class said, “How far do you have to go before you can consider 0.999999 repeating to equal one?”
In this case, we have one full beer, then an ever increasing number of halves being added to a second glass; half, plus half of that, plus half of that, ad infinitum. At some point, the amount being added is so small compared to the amount actually in the cup that we should be able to say the second cup is full…at least in the practical world, if not the mathematical.
If you take 1/3 and print it as a decimal, it would be 0.33333 with the three repeating infinitely. So, if we multiply that by three, we get 0.999999 repeating or 3/3. Does 0.9999999 repeating equal one? It depends on who you ask. I say, “Yes, because I live in the real world.” Others will argue otherwise (and they will be wrong…)
Oh, and what cosmocat said is also true.
Good one, that made me chuckle
I am generally very poor at telling jokes, however try this (kind of math related) one on for size:
Q: Who did King Arthur and Sir Lancelot hire to build their round table?
A: Sir Cumference
I’m not one to go to bars, but if you’re telling me there’s one containing non-euclidean space…
geometric series. the sum of the sequence adds up to 2. Hence, don’t underestimate the barman
“If you take 1/3 and print it as a decimal, it would be 0.33333 with the three repeating infinitely. So, if we multiply that by three, we get 0.999999 repeating or 3/3. Does 0.9999999 repeating equal one? It depends on who you ask. I say, “Yes, because I live in the real world.†Others will argue otherwise (and they will be wrong…)”
You’re right, they would be.
let n=.999 repeating
let 10n=9.999 repeating
10n - 1n = 9.999 repeating - .999 repeating
9n = 9
1n = 1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0.999...
Here’s a simple proof:
S = 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + …
S/2 = 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + …
S = 1 + S/2
S/2 = 1
S = 2
I got it straight, but I didn’t laugh for some reason.
@Flimm:
that’s only true if you show that S converges in the first place. if not you are just adding and multiplying numbers to infinity.
I generally dislike math, but that’s a good one. And yeah, I understood it, but I thought of it as an expanded version of Gauss’s equation.
A friend told me this last night.
An engineer, a computer scientist and a mathematician went to Africa to catch lions.
The computer scientist download gigabytes of satellite images, segmented the data and employed 100,000 screensavers to process the data, working out where the most lions were.
The engineer developed an elaborate and easy to mass manufacture trap.
The mathematician put a large sheet of paper on the ground, stood in the middle and drew a square around himself. “I have defined a space such that I am outside the cage, and everything on the other side of this square is inside the cage. Therefore, I have caught ever lion in Africa”.
Tim: lol
dude, this joke is really lame. and your first comment shows that you didn’t even understood why anybody could even consider this to be remotely funny.
Peter: ouch.
Peter:
Being esoteric doesn’t make a joke bad. It just puts it outside the realm of the sort of stupid, base humour one would find in your average teenager-aimed movie.
@matthew: sorry, I wasn’t in a very good mood when I posted this
@mackenzie: true, but lame jokes are lame, whether they are esoteric or not.
OK, I laughed. I’m geeky enough to laugh at that.
But then my geekiness went too far and ruind the joke.
Because there’s a finite number of molecules in a beer, and you can’t have a beer size of < 1 molecule (actually, beer is a solution of multiple types of molecules, so even a 1 molecule beer is impossible), so the infinite number of mathematicians can’t infinitely order half-size beers….
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