The best maths joke I know is a classic that was part of the fortune file for 4.2 BSD Unix, and attributed to Dave J. Grabiner when he was a PhD student at Harvard (completely clean, but also incomprehensible for the uninitiated):
“The number you have dialed is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.”
Is it because on a complex plane, imaginary numbers are on the y-axis and real numbers are on the x-axis? Or am I misinterpreting it?
Yep, you got it.
Yay, good to see high school math hasn’t stopped me from understanding math jokes.
Algebrists will appreciate this one:
That mouthful that I suspect Firefox’s spellcheck would insist is Euler-Macaroni if I tried spelling the not famous guy’s name did come to mind, but I didn’t realize that was what you were referring to. Granted, like I said, its a constant no one ever talks about in articles and videos that do their best to get the maths right.
And yeah, I knew the transcendentality of most of the algebraic combinations of pi and e were open questions, but I didn’t realize their irrationality was as well.
Though, I have to wonder where in the world they teach limits in 9th grade. I know the US is a bit of a laughing stock among the developed world when it comes to primary and secondary education, and my memory isn’t the best, but I’m pretty sure limits don’t come up until Calculus, which, at least in the US, is a freshman undergrad course for most people, and when it is taken in highschool, it’s an AP course by default most often taken in 11th or 12th grade.
I learned what a limit is in 9th grade (US) because I had upperclassmen friends, many of whom were nerds. I haven’t learned officially what limits are yet, but I suspect I’ll learn them this year (AP Calculus AB) if my aforementioned friends are trustworthy.
Admittedly, the school for the blind and visually impaired I attended for most of my K-12 education never had more than about 90-95 students from Kindergarten through 12th grade during my time there, there was only one upperclassman who could challenge my King of the Nerds status who was close enough the school’s policies of age segregation didn’t prevent us from interacting, and Math was the one subject I was more advanced in than him(he was a grade higher, but I was two years ahead of my yearmates in math)… I was part of a dual-enrollment program the school for the blind had with one of the local public schools, but the only socializing I ever got to do with the public school students was chatting about Anime with my classmates in my Japanese Foreign Language classes(and I suspect the only reason sensei tolerated that as much as she did was because Japanese culture was part of the curriculum)… ended up taking AP Statistics instead of Calculus my senior year due to scheduling constraints(could only attend morning classes at the public school because the school of the Blind sends boarding students home after lunch on Friday, needed to retake Japanese II, of which there was only one section, the only morning section of Calculus conflicted, the school for the blind didn’t have the materials/schedule opening to let their HS math teacher teach Calculus that year, and the school fo the blind’s previous Calculus student had been a senior when I was in like seventh or eighth grade and female, and because the student body was segregated by both age and gender, the only highschool girl I had regular contact with during my middle school years was the one I shared my maths classes with until I finished the normal HS Maths Curriculum.
Granted, I also attended highschool back in the days before YouTube and when MySpace hadn’t yet been obliterated by Facebook. about the only people I could geek out with over maths were my Maths Teacher for Algebra I through Trigonometry and the aforementioned classmate.
Oh, and to bring this post a bit more on topic, the school for the blind had a K-12 student population of 69… and my graduating class numbered 9 students.