At the pub quiz - “What is a hyperbola?”
Among those of us around the table were three mathematicians, wondering what definition they were looking for…
[Read More]The Filing Cabinet, the Imp, and the Greek (March 2004)
[This post - on archives (and their ultimately inconsequential gaps), the mathematical quirks of unexpected hangings and “The Bottle Imp” by Robert Louis Stevenson, and seeing El Greco at the National Gallery - was originally published on LiveJournal on 23 March 2004 and is re-posted here as part of a migration from Livejournal. It has some minor editing, interjections from 2022, and fixing/replacement of broken links - not everywhere has been able to follow Tim Berners-Lee’s 1998-and-still-there advice that Cool URIs don’t change.]
[Read More]Maths jokes from Alexa, Google, and Princeton
When deciding which home assistant is best, a key test might be “OK Google/Alexa, tell me a maths joke”. (OK, your priorities may vary.) Alexa has a variety. Google has only one, and that is “How do you keep warm in a cold room? You go to the corner, because it’s always 90 degrees.”
[Read More]