Entries with tag "math"

OK, my standards seem to be getting pretty low as far as what I'm willing to post here. Soon you'll start seeing surveys about the number of people I've kissed and "What type of pasta are you?" quizzes. But these make me laugh and, ultimately, that's one of the few goals I strive towards here.

Q. What do you get if you cross a pig and a sheep?

A. A vector with magnitude (length of pig * length of sheep * sin θ) in the direction mutually perpendicular to the pig and the sheep determined by the right hand rule.

Q. What do you get if you cross a mosquito and a mountain climber?

A. You can't; a mountain climber is a scalar!

A policeman pulls a guy over. "Do you know that you just ran through a red light?" he says.
"I didn't run a red light," the guy says. "I saw the light, and it was green."
The policeman says, "Well, then I'll have to write you a speeding ticket!"

Q. What is the physicist's definition of a vector space?

A. A set V satisfying the axiom that for any x in V, x has a little arrow drawn over it.

Man, why is it that reading pretty much any page on MathWorld leads to an immediate feeling of inadequacy and stupidity? It's like someone going way overboard with one of those jokes where they make up technical-sounding words to ridicule the concept of jargon. Except it's all real:

In many cases, the Hausdorff dimension correctly describes the correction term for a resonator with fractal perimeter in Lorentz's conjecture. However, in general, the proper dimension to use turns out to be the Minkowski-Bouligand dimension (Schroeder 1991).

I tend to feel I'm relatively well educated, but reading things on that website makes me feel like an six-year-old stumbling across his older brother's Calculus textbook. I felt the same way watching A Beautiful Mind. I'm so in awe of mathematicians. I can't imagine being conversant in all of those terms and knowing what to do with them. But I'd like to be.

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