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Comment by zokat | Hacker News Reader

I like this one:

Russian engineer got fed up of having all responsibility and low salary, so he moves to another city and pretends to be an ordinary worker, same salary and peace of mind. However, not long after communist party sends him to evening classes. On his first day there at maths class he was asked about circle circumference formula, but for some reason he could not remember it off hand, so he goes on blackboard and tries to work it out with linear integral. After exhausting whole blackboard he finally gets the result:

-2RPi

Then all of the sudden he hears all of the class whispering to him: "Change the direction of integration!"

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Reminds me of one a professor told in class. Lemme see if I can do it justice; it was 15 years ago.

A math professor's friend is visiting from out of town, and they go out to dinner. The professor says that in this town, everyone has a college degree and knows calculus. He makes a bet with his friend that the waitress can solve an integral. But there's no way waitstaff know calculus, so he cheats: he excuses himself to go to the bathroom, finds the waitress, and tells her that when he asks her a question, she should answer "x^2 / 2". Then he goes back to the table. When the waitress checks on them, he asks her "what's the integral of x"? She answers "x^2 / 2 plus an arbitrary constant".

I feel stupid asking, but what's the joke? I get that flipping the direction of integration would negate the result.

The joke is that the entire class was made up of brilliant engineers who acted dumb and were sent to a basic math class for educating.

That is funny, thank you.

And that is the funniest thing I've read for a long time.

Bots appear to be getting much better :)

Heh, we had the exact same joke when I was growing up in Poland. It's a hidden critique of the system,which is a best kind of joke.

Once whole population has been disarmed that is the only weapon...

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