Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by daly | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

daly

Let L be a group.

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

View on HN

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 :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com