The story behind the Connecticut deli math sign | Hacker News Reader

The story behind the Connecticut deli math sign

cbc.ca

82 pointsokket58 comments

Does anyone remember the story about the famous mathematician at (I think) Princeton, who would always pick 3 as a random number in his examples. ("Let's pick a random number, say 3...")

And then he ended up mentoring an entire generation of mathematicians who adopted his habit.

And everyone would always "randomly" pick 3. It became a thing.

It's kind of a variant on the "let L be a group" because the joke relies entirely on the social conventions of a small group of people.

https://www.xkcd.com/221/

Also: http://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25

This actually has a bit of a point behind it, because the digits of Pi http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/~huberty/math5337/groupe/digits.htm... feature "999999" much earlier than would be expected if the digits were uniformly distributed. So once that sequence was discovered, it took a lot more work for mathematicians to convince themselves that it is completely "random" (or "normal" in the jargon). It still hasn't been proven though! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi#Irrationality_and_normality

Is that a reference to the hilariously broken PS3 RNG? For those unaware, the PS3 was jailbroken because their RNG always returned 4.

The self-inflicted degradation of the random number generator in the Debian OpenSSL packages were the main inspiration for this, I think.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_number_generator_attack...

The comic is from 2007. The Debian vulnerability wasn't announced until 2008.

I'm fairly sure this basic joke predates xkcd by quite a while. For example, here's a Dilbert comic from 2001 with a slight variation on it:

http://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25

This Jargon File entry listing several specific "random numbers" has the same theme:

http://catb.org/jargon/html/R/random-numbers.html

Thanks. It came up so often during 2008 that I assumed it was inspired by this event, never bothered to check the dates.

XKCD 221 came out February 9th, 2007[1], so either Randall new about the bug before details were announced in May 2008, or it's just a joke about randomness not tied to any particular reference.

[1] Go to https://xkcd.com/archive/, hover over the title of a comic, and a tooltip will show the date

EDIT: I see 'mikeash beat me to it.

Reminds me of how 57 became the "Grothendiek prime".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/57_(number)#In_mathematics

Alice wants to send a message to Bob. However, Eve is listening in...

I love math but I find this whole article and the associated jokes pretty contentless and somewhat boring.

I think it is one of those local situations where you have to know the people involved and go to the same cafe &c. In jokes basically.

Here are a few better ones:

https://mathoverflow.net/questions/1083/do-good-math-jokes-e...

Mathematicians can have a focus (and corresponding lack of real-world awareness) that puts even us engineers to shame. Once as an undergrad I was taking a class in the math building, and there was a professor blocking the door because he was reading a flyer taped to it about an upcoming symposium or something. I coughed a little to indicate I was there, and he turned, acknowledged my presence, and then went right back to reading the flyer for another fifteen seconds or so.

We love you, you crazy bastards.

I feel like they should count for less points in Nerd Sniping. https://xkcd.com/356/

But how many points in grammar trolling?

...It's "fewer" there, isn't it.

Less is used when you can't count the object discussed. Fewer is used when you can.

"I have 2 moneys" doesn't make sense, so you use "less money."

"I have 2 points" does make sense, so you use "fewer points."

I dunno...

"Fewer rational numbers" works, but "less real numbers" sounds funny.

I feel like I'm missing a joke here, but you can count real numbers ("the list contains 5 real numbers") therefore it's "fewer real numbers"

I can never remember a lot of those "X or Y" rules in grammar/English. Fewer or less, whom or who, etc.

Might be my own ignorance, might be my teachers growing up using trainwrecks like "yous" and "alls."

There's the classic/apocryphal story as well of the student who stops a math professor in the hallway and asks a complicated question. Professor gives a long, thorough answer, and the student becomes enlightened. Just as the student is about to leave, the professor asks "Wait, which way did I come from?" Student points out "That way", and the professor goes "Great, then I've had lunch."

Norbert Wiener, the MIT professor, is generally the source of many of these (probably somewhat apocryphal) stories of 'absent minded professors'.

The two maths jokes that I can remember from my undergrad days are:

"What's purple and commutes?" "An abelian grape"

"What's yellow and equivalent to the axiom of choice?" "Zorn's Lemon"

Evidently there's something inherently funny about group theory.

"What's yellow, normed, and complete?" "A Bananach space."

You still missed one, because there are four canonical math fruit jokes: http://www.stoneswww.academickids.com/encyclopedia/index.php...

My favorite math joke, imagine a professor speaking: "I explained it in my seminar, but they didn't seem to understand. So, I had to explain it again, and again they didn't get it. I ended up explaining it a third time, and by that point I understood it, but they still didn't understand.

Many more jokes of varies quality: https://mathoverflow.net/questions/1083/do-good-math-jokes-e...

Let L be a group.

I actually guffawed at that one. I am SO going to use that.

I still don't get it. :/

Typically, you'd use G when picking a variable name for a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_(mathematics)

The equivalent programmer joke might be something like "int str;" or "string array_length;"

It's kind of funny in the "oh that's a really bad joke" kind of way :)

"Let ε<0."

Or a similar but more blatant telling of the original joke would be "Let ℵ₀ be a group."

"Let ε<0." There goes the neighborhood!

Excellent. Thankyou very much.

I teach basic Maths to adults in the UK, so I tend to use these old faves...

"What did the zero say to the eight?"

"Nice belt"

(even my sister has heard that one)

"Why does noone talk to circles?"

"There's no point"

Thankyou and goodnight

Why is six afraid of seven?

Because seven eight nine.

Never grep a yacc by the inode.

For what real values of i does the sum of ε^i, taken ε=1 to infinity, converge?

Our real analysis lecturer once put this question on the blackboard (with sum as the proper scientific sum notation).

Even though we all knew the answer as trivial it took most of us some time to figure it out in such screwy notation (his point was that our mind is not invariant WRT notation, do not make up monsters when the normal schemas exist)

In 2005, which had a very bad hurricane season in the Atlantic, (that was the year of Katrina, Rita, and Wilma) they ran out of names for hurricanes and had to use Greek letters. The last hurricane of the season was called Epsilon. Due to my mathematical training I found it very hard to be scared of it.

Due to my training in parser theory, this hurricane is unnamed.

Due to my training in automata theory, this hurricane may trigger state changes without consuming input symbols.

Which is intuitive since only tornados are known to consume input symbols.

A bit less concise but still my favorite: An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar (which I already think is funny) and the first orders a pint of ale, the second orders a half pint, the third orders a quarter pint. After this goes on for a bit the bartender looks disgusted, slams two pints on the counter and says "You mathematicians really have to get to know your limits!"

Isn't SO a special orthogonal group, as in the rotational symmetries? Are we in the presence of a really obscure pun?

Can someone think of a way to recover the liar's paradox from statements about L being a group?

Because then we can just let L be a Lie(ing) group :)

This thread might have been more interesting if it had of read Connecticut deli meth sign.

For those wondering, the deli is 5370 km from Reading.

world's shortest math joke:

For any epsilon less than zero .....

tl;dr: They were down there talking about math one afternoon and the owner of the deli was trying to take the order from one of them and he was a little bit too preoccupied with mathematics to fully engage in the sandwich ordering process.

One actually doesn't have to read more than this tl;dr, since the interview in the article is tedious and takes forever to get to the point

And the joke is buried at the end!

And it isn't a very good joke.

That's the best kind.

I guess a simple anecdote about math dweebs holding up the line would be less publishable without all the window-dressing.

Thank you; you beat me to posting the TLDR.

The sign is humorous, but the article is entirely too long for the subject.

Ok, in future please refrain from ordering sandwiches while standing in the math line.

Sadly Dave's Sandwich was not a Ham Sandwich, said the topolgist.

I wish I read this tldr earlier. I spent 7 minutes scanning this boring interview for an explanation without success.

I think it's a little funnier than your tl;dr: in particular, a member of the math faculty, who has a sandwich named after him and who is friends with the owner, was a little bit too preoccupied with mathematics to fully engage with the sandwich ordering process.

CBC asking the real questions

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