Math quant jokes

[Bastian Gross]

How to prove it.

Proof by vigorous handwaving: <DD>Works well in a classroom or seminar setting. </DD>
Proof by forward reference:

<DD>Reference is usually to a forthcoming paper of the author, which is often not as forthcoming as at first. </DD>
Proof by funding:

<DD>How could three different government agencies be wrong? </DD>
Proof by example:

<DD>The author gives only the case n = 2 and suggests that it contains most of the ideas of the general proof. </DD>
Proof by omission:

<DD>"The reader may easily supply the details" or "The other 253 cases are analogous" Proof by deferral:

<DD>"We'll prove this later in the course".
Proof by picture:

<DD>A more convincing form of proof by example. Combines well with proof by omission.
Proof by intimidation:

<DD>"Trivial."
Proof by adverb:

<DD>"As is quite clear, the elementary aforementioned statement is obviously valid."
Proof by seduction:

<DD>"Convince yourself that this is true! "
Proof by cumbersome notation:

<DD>Best done with access to at least four alphabets and special symbols.
Proof by exhaustion:

<DD>An issue or two of a journal devoted to your proof is useful.
Proof by obfuscation:

<DD>A long plotless sequence of true and/or meaningless syntactically related statements.
Proof by wishful citation:

<DD>The author cites the negation, converse, or generalization of a theorem from the literature to support his claims.
Proof by eminent authority:

<DD>"I saw Karp in the elevator and he said it was probably NP- complete."
Proof by personal communication:

<DD>"Eight-dimensional colored cycle stripping is NP-complete [Karp, personal communication]."
Proof by reduction to the wrong problem:

<DD>"To see that infinite-dimensional colored cycle stripping is decidable, we reduce it to the halting problem."
Proof by reference to inaccessible literature:

<DD>The author cites a simple corollary of a theorem to be found in a privately circulated memoir of the Slovenian Philological Society, 1883.
Proof by importance:

<DD>A large body of useful consequences all follow from the proposition in question.
Proof by accumulated evidence:

<DD>Long and diligent search has not revealed a counterexample.
Proof by cosmology:

<DD>The negation of the proposition is unimaginable or meaningless. Popular for proofs of the existence of God.
Proof by mutual reference:

<DD>In reference A, Theorem 5 is said to follow from Theorem 3 in reference B, which is shown to follow from Corollary 6.2 in reference C, which is an easy consequence of Theorem 5 in reference A.
Proof by metaproof:

<DD>A method is given to construct the desired proof. The correctness of the method is proved by any of these techniques.
Proof by vehement assertion:

<DD>It is useful to have some kind of authority relation to the audience.
Proof by ghost reference:

<DD>Nothing even remotely resembling the cited theorem appears in the reference given.
Proof by semantic shift:

<DD>Some of the standard but inconvenient definitions are changed for the statement of the result.
Proof by appeal to intuition:

<DD>Cloud-shaped drawings frequently help here.
</DD>

 

[Bastian Gross]

Why do quants ... ?

Q) Why do quants always have the best gardens?
A) Because they spend time so much time working on their trees and hedging!

Q) Who is a quant's favourite actor?
A) Heston

Q) Why do quants never get ripped off in Bangkok?
A) Because they are experts in pricing exotics.
Q) Why was the FX quant so unlucky with the ladies?
A) Because he always kept his dates short.

Q) Why did one quant say hush to the other?
A) Because he was working on the library!

Q) Why are quants always happy?
A) Because they are always working on their smiles.

Q) Why was the quant willing to sell his own mother?
A) Because he figured out relative value!

 

[Bastian Gross]

lame excuse

 

[Bastian Gross]

I accidentally took the Fourier transform of my cat!

 

[Bastian Gross]

Foreign Policy without orientation

 

[Aditya Chitral]

Something interesting for quants or mathematicians.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

Those guys are awesome. The lyrics rocks, full of nice pieces like "our relation is not well-defined"

Finite Simple Group (of order two)
A Klein Four original by Matt Salomone

The path of love is never smooth
But mine's continuous for you
You're the upper bound in the chains of my heart
You're my Axiom of Choice, you know it's true

But lately our relation's not so well-defined
And I just can't function without you
I'll prove my proposition and I'm sure you'll find
We're a finite simple group of order two

I'm losing my identity
I'm getting tensor every day
And without loss of generality
I will assume that you feel the same way

Since every time I see you, you just quotient out
The faithful image that I map into
But when we're one-to-one you'll see what I'm about
'Cause we're a finite simple group of order two

Our equivalence was stable,
A principal love bundle sitting deep inside
But then you drove a wedge between our two-forms
Now everything is so complexified

When we first met, we simply connected
My heart was open but too dense
Our system was already directed
To have a finite limit, in some sense

I'm living in the kernel of a rank-one map
From my domain, its image looks so blue,
'Cause all I see are zeroes, it's a cruel trap
But we're a finite simple group of order two

I'm not the smoothest operator in my class,
But we're a mirror pair, me and you,
So let's apply forgetful functors to the past
And be a finite simple group, a finite simple group,
Let's be a finite simple group of order two
(Oughter: "Why not three?")

I've proved my proposition now, as you can see,
So let's both be associative and free
And by corollary, this shows you and I to be
Purely inseparable. Q. E. D.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

An old joke but good for anyone thinking of jumping the field

One professor of mathematics noticed that his kitchen sink at his home broke down. He called a plumber. The plumber came on the next day, sealed a few screws and everything was working as before. The professor was delighted. However, when the plumber gave him the bill a minute later, he was shocked. "This is one third of my monthly salary!" he yelled. Well, all he same he paid it and then the plumber said to him: "I understand your position as a professor. Why don't you come to our company and apply for a plumber position? You will earn three times as much as a professor. But remember, when you apply, tell them that you completed only the seventh grade. They don't like educated people."

So it happened. The professor got a plumbering job and his life significantly improved. He just had to seal a screw or two occasionally, and his salary went up significantly. One day, the board of the plumbing company decided that every plumber had to go to evening classes to complete the eight grade. So, our professor had to go there too. It just happened that the first class was math. The evening teacher, to check students' knowledge, asked for a formula for the area of the circle. The person who was asked was the professor.
He jumped to the board, and then he realized that he had forgotten the formula. He started to reason it, he filled the white board with integrals, differentials and other advanced formulas to conclude the result he forgot. As a result he got "minus pi times r square". He didn't like the minus, so he started all over again. He got the minus again. No matter how many times he tried, he always got a minus. He was frustrated. He looked a bit scared at the class and saw all the plumbers whisper: "Switch the limits of the integral!!"

 

[yzia]

Not From Concentrate - #205


haha, that comic was made by my friend actually, who had a strip going with the University of Maryland student newpaper.

 

[woody]

I wish this was a joke:

Verizon Math Fail

 

[Sanket Patel]

I wish this was a joke:

Verizon Math Fail

That is great. My favorite part is:

Caller: "Do you recognize that there is a difference between 1-dollar and 1-cent?"
Verizon: "Yes, definitely."

Caller: "Do you recognize that there is a difference between 0.5-dollars and 0.5-cents?"
Verizon: "Yes, definitely."

Caller: "Do you recognize that there is a difference between 0.002-dollars and 0.002-cents?"
Verizon: "No."
Verizon: "Well, I mean it's obviously a difference of opinion"

 

[doug reich]

That is great. My favorite part is:

I love that part. At that point, there's just no conversation any more. You could still try:

"Do you agree that X dollars and X cents are different? Meaning, if I put a number for X, like 1, I would be saying '1 dollar and 1 cent are different'"... then put X=.002

Who knows, it's just a bad scene, as they say.

 

[Eugene Krel]

I, for one, welcome our new (subjective)math overlords.

 

[Roger Trimble]

I love that part. At that point, there's just no conversation any more. You could still try:

"Do you agree that X dollars and X cents are different? Meaning, if I put a number for X, like 1, I would be saying '1 dollar and 1 cent are different'"... then put X=.002

Who knows, it's just a bad scene, as they say.

I guess when you get down to small numbers, they're really all just the same. So, 0.002 Million Trillion, is really just 0.002% of a basis point... And who says this country is falling behind in math?

 

[Sanket Patel]

For those in Prof Raynes' Structured Finance class, it reminds of the short excursion last night on qualitative vs quantitative - perhaps Verzion is trying to do math qualitatively.

 

[Aditya Chitral]

Not really a Mathish joke, but I liked this one.

"A tourist walked into a pet shop and was looking at the animals on display. While he was there another customer walked in and said to the shopkeeper, ''I'll have that monkey please''. The shopkeeper nodded, went over to a cage at the side of the shop, and took out a monkey. He fit a collar and leash and handed it to the customer, saying, ''That'll be $5000''. The customer paid and walked out with his monkey. Startled, the tourist went over to the shopkeeper and said, ''That was a very expensive monkey. Most of them are only a few hundred dollars. Why did he cost so much?'' The shopkeeper answered, ''Ah, that monkey can program in 'C' very fast, tight code, no bugs, well worth the money.'' The tourist looked at the monkey in another cage. ''That one's even more expensive - $10,000! What does he do?'' ''Oh, that one's a C++ monkey; he can manage object-oriented programming, Visual C++, even some Java. All the really useful stuff,'' said the shopkeeper. The tourist looked around for a little longer and saw a third monkey in a cage of his own. The price tag around his neck read $50,000. He gasped to the shopkeeper, ''That one costs more than all the others put together! What on earth does he do?''

The shopkeeper shrugged and said, ''Well, to tell you the truth, I haven't actually seen him do anything, but he says he's a SAP consultant.''

 

[Roger Trimble]

The shopkeeper shrugged and said, ''Well, to tell you the truth, I haven't actually seen him do anything, but he says he's a SAP consultant.''

Ahh... I have been on the customer end of SAP, and the integration of said platform to our factory. This joke is closer to truthful than humorous.

 

[Aditya Chitral]

With no offense to anybody

A mathematician, an accountant and an economist apply for the same job. The interviewer calls in the mathematician and asks "What do two plus two equal?"

The mathematician replies "Four."
The interviewer asks "Four, exactly?" The mathematician looks at the interviewer incredulously and says "Yes, four, exactly."

Then the interviewer calls in the accountant and asks the same question "What do two plus two equal?" The accountant says "On average, four - give or take ten percent, but on average, four."

Then the interviewer calls in the economist and poses the same question "What do two plus two equal?"

The economist gets up, locks the door, closes the shade, sits down next to the interviewer and says "What do you want it to equal?"

 

[goodstudent]

A mathematician, an engineer and a chemist are at a conference. They are staying in adjoining rooms. One evening they are downstairs in the bar. The mathematician goes to bed first. The chemist goes next, followed a minute or two later by the engineer. The chemist notices that in the corridor outside their rooms a rubbish bin is ablaze. There is a bucket of water nearby. The chemist starts concocting a means of generating carbon dioxide in order to create a makeshift extinguisher but before he can do so the engineer arrives, dumps the water on the fire and puts it out. The next morning the chemist and engineer tell the mathematician about the fire. She admits she saw it. They ask her why she didn't put it out. She replies contemptuously "there was a fire and a bucket of water: a solution obviously existed."

 

[Eugene Krel]

The economist in this joke should be replaced by "Risk manager" and it will reflect real life precisely.

With no offense to anybody

A mathematician, an accountant and an economist apply for the same job. The interviewer calls in the mathematician and asks "What do two plus two equal?"

The mathematician replies "Four."
The interviewer asks "Four, exactly?" The mathematician looks at the interviewer incredulously and says "Yes, four, exactly."

Then the interviewer calls in the accountant and asks the same question "What do two plus two equal?" The accountant says "On average, four - give or take ten percent, but on average, four."

Then the interviewer calls in the economist and poses the same question "What do two plus two equal?"

The economist gets up, locks the door, closes the shade, sits down next to the interviewer and says "What do you want it to equal?"