Donny
Level: Delver
Rank Points: 40
Registered: 11-01-2004
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Re: Math Jokes (+2)
Next several stories are attributed to real mathematicians. For most of them, it was impossible to check the truthfulness of the story. Therefore the names are often removed.
In 1915, Emma Noether arrived in Göttingen but was denied the private-docent status. The argument was that a woman cannot attend the University senate (the faculty meetings). Hilbert's reaction was: "Gentlemen! There is nothing wrong to have a woman in the senate. Senate is not a bath."
After Laplace completed his masterpiece Mecanique Celeste (Mechanics of the Heavens) he presented a copy to his friend Napoleon. Napoleon, who also was a mathematician, after going through the book called in Laplace and said to him: "You have written a book about Mechanics of the Heavens without mentioning God?" Laplace replied: "Sire, I had no need of that hypothesis".
The following problem can be solved either the easy way or the hard way.
Two trains 200 miles apart are moving toward each other; each one is going at a speed of 50 miles per hour. A fly starting on the front of one of them flies back and forth between them at a rate of 75 miles per hour. It does this until the trains collide and crush the fly to death. What is the total distance the fly has flown?
The fly actually hits each train an infinite number of times before it gets crushed, and one could solve the problem the hard way with pencil and paper by summing an infinite series of distances. The easy way is as follows: Since the trains are 200 miles apart and each train is going 50 miles an hour, it takes 2 hours for the trains to collide. Therefore the fly was flying for two hours. Since the fly was flying at a rate of 75 miles per hour, the fly must have flown 150 miles. That's all there is to it.
When this problem was posed to John von Neumann, he immediately replied, "150 miles."
"It is very strange," said the poser, "but nearly everyone tries to sum the infinite series."
"What do you mean, strange?" asked Von Neumann. "That's how I did it!"
Another von Neumann quote : Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things, you just get used to them.
The mathematician S. had to move to a new place. His wife didn't trust him very much, so when they stood down on the street with all their things, she asked him to watch their ten trunks, while she get a taxi. Some minutes later she returned. Said the husband:
"I thought you said there were ten trunks, but I've only counted to nine."
The wife said: "No, they're TEN!"
"But I have counted them: 0, 1, 2, ..."
This anecdote is attributed to Landau (the Russian physicist Lev not the Göttingen mathematician Edmund).
Landau's group was discussing a bright new theory, and one of junior colleagues of Landau bragged that he had independently discovered the theory a couple of years ago, but did not bother to publish his finding.
"I would not repeat this claim if I were you," Landau replied: "There is nothing wrong if one has not found
a solution to a particular problem. However, if one has found it but does not publish it, he shows a poor judgment and inability to understand what important is in modern physics".
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"If I were to awaken after having slept for a thousand years, my first question would be: Has the Riemann hypothesis been proven?"
David Hilbert (1862-1943)
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