Do you have a favorite math story? Please share - the funnier the better!

Here's mine:

My family and I were watching HBO's Crashbox when they were flashing a bunch of math problems on the screen.

Something along the lines of the following came up:

9 + 6 / 3 = ?

I quickly blurted out: 11

Shortly thereafter, the answer 5 came up, and my wife exclaimed, "that was so easy! I can't believe you got it wrong!"

To which I replied, "No, they have it wrong! They clearly ignored operator precedence -- where you multiply and divide before you add and subtract. They teach you this in beginning algebra if not sooner."

After a moment of puzzling over whether I was pulling her leg, she said, "well, this is a children's show - they're probably not going to have algebra concepts in it." Touche!

So I told the story at work and it floored one of my colleagues. He couldn't believe that they would have put a problem in error like this on a kid's show. His expectation was that in mixing operators of different precedence, they would take pains to make sure the correct answer would be arrived at in left-to-right evaluation order while still honoring the precedence. In other words, he contended that the problem should have been: 6/3+9

Anyhow, please share your math funnies.

I think I mentioned this one before, but I can't resist.

I had a junior school teacher called Mr Robinson. He was an idiot. His idiocy related to mathematics.

Mr Robinson insisted that 4x0=4 and (though he didn't express it in these terms, it is obvious what his idea was) that nx0=n. We had all previously been taught that nx0=0 and protested - but he insisted that:

"4x0=4 because you already have the 4 there to start with".

(No. I am not joking.)

Needless to say, the man was completely incompetent. He then got the idea, with the protests, that his pupils misunderstood arithmetic, so in his next test on multiplication he made a point on asking questions like that - and everyone had to give the answers he wanted - whether by genuine belief or to please him I am not completely sure - so he worked hard on reinforcing his idiocy in the next generation. It gets worse. He also asked us, in the test, things like 0x4=? and of course everyone said "4" but no - in this case he correctly knew that 0x4=0 because "You don't already have the 4 there to start with. You just have 0 to start with, but when you have 4x0 you have the 4 there to start with". i.e. he can't even be consistently stupid - and he expects his pupils to show the same inconsistency.

What comes across in all this, to me, is that he wasn't just making a mistake: he actually had no understanding of arithmetic. For example, what did he think 4x0.5 was? 4? Because you already have the 4 there to start with? But that would be stupid. Calculators existed at the time - and he probably he had one. Did he never punch any of this into one? Also, he taught fractions, and he would have realized that (4/1) x (1/2) = 2, so to make sense of that he would have to say that 4x0.5=2, but in that case he has the stupid situation that he should see that 4xn gets closer to zero as n gets closer to zero - but yet he thinks it magically jumps back to 4 when n=0! Also, did he never imagine arranging dots in a grid of x dots and y dots and rotating it to see that xy=yx? None of this is exactly advanced. Basically, the man was an idiot. This little idea he has that nx0=n is just incompatible with anything else he might try to do with mathematics. Basically, if you think this, you can't have a properly formed concept of what numbers are in your head: it suggests you just learned some rules by rote, and your understanding is so shallow that you can't see when you have them wrong.

Now, is it fair to mock him in public over being rubbish at arithmetic?

Yes: he was capable of deliberately humiliating people, in a very deliberate, unprofessional way, for not being able to answer what he regarded as a mathematics problem that they should be able to answer. That makes it okay to do it back.

From my 'A' level mechanics days, my maths teacher gave me this aide mémoire ; "Every couple has its moment in a field"

Paul Almond wrote:he should see that 4xn gets closer to zero as n gets closer to zero - but yet he thinks it magically jumps back to 4 when n=0!

But it is 4 when n=0!

susu.exp wrote:

Paul Almond wrote:he should see that 4xn gets closer to zero as n gets closer to zero - but yet he thinks it magically jumps back to 4 when n=0!

But it is 4 when n=0!

I meant the "!" to be interpreted as an exclamation mark, and not as a factorial sign.

Paul Almond wrote:I meant the "!" to be interpreted as an exclamation mark, and not as a factorial sign.

I know. But this is a maths funnies thread, isn´t it?

susu.exp wrote:

Paul Almond wrote:I meant the "!" to be interpreted as an exclamation mark, and not as a factorial sign.

I know. But this is a maths funnies thread, isn´t it?

Yes. LOL.

I had as stupid teacher in the elementary school as Paul had, only she was a young woman. Once I disputed with another guy about what is 1/1; my opinion was 1, his 0. So we asked the teacher and she silenced me saying it's 0. As stubborn as I am, I left with an "eppur si muove" feeling and never returned to the question.

Afterwards I've sometimes thought how she reasoned the result. I believe that she didn't really understand more arithmetics than addition and subtraction. Of the nature of division and multiplication she had only an intuitive feeling that division makes things smaller and multiplication bigger. So, if 1 is divided by any number, the result (in the set of non-negative integers) must be 0, because no other smaller number exists.

Heh, Paul's story made me remember this, obviously because of the similarity in his teacher's reasoning.

and



and this one below actually happened while we were at school, and the teacher stopped and said: Every year, i get the same thing asked by somebody!

Well, I got a 'best answer' at yahoo answers to the question of whether mathematicians use the 'algorithm method' of birth control. Answer: No, only former USA Vice Presidents concerned with climate change use that method. Mathematicians don't require birth control because they never have sex. Other than that, it isn't easy to think of any funny math stories. I suppose, on the same topic, some might consider the fact that only 30% of self-described Republicans believe in man-made global warming to be one.

Rilx wrote:I had as stupid teacher in the elementary school as Paul had, only she was a young woman. Once I disputed with another guy about what is 1/1; my opinion was 1, his 0. So we asked the teacher and she silenced me saying it's 0. As stubborn as I am, I left with an "eppur si muove" feeling and never returned to the question.

Afterwards I've sometimes thought how she reasoned the result. I believe that she didn't really understand more arithmetics than addition and subtraction. Of the nature of division and multiplication she had only an intuitive feeling that division makes things smaller and multiplication bigger. So, if 1 is divided by any number, the result (in the set of non-negative integers) must be 0, because no other smaller number exists.

Heh, Paul's story made me remember this, obviously because of the similarity in his teacher's reasoning.

remainder is 0.

Pombolo wrote:

OMG I knew O'Reilly was dumb but now I see that he doesn't understand percentages either. I also wonder what he could possibly be thinking when he says that they do statistics differently in the Netherlands.

blasphemer_number1 wrote:OMG I knew O'Reilly was dumb but now I see that he doesn't understand percentages either. I also wonder what he could possibly be thinking when he says that they do statistics differently in the Netherlands.

He even did it again. I can't remember what interview the second time was from, but several months after this clip he was again caught making the same mistake: confusing percentage for amount.

Cripes, I am busy. This be the wrong thread, but the RC church is canonizing someone from my county today, this being the 7th day of a new calender of fourty-two 9-day weeks, me being 47, with plans of retracing a walk today done Thursday past a frigging Pepsi plant. I guess that saying I recall an RC cola and that my father was obsessive about Coca-Cola makes things better (¿?).