Related papers: My Favorite Math Jokes
Thirty original and collected problems, puzzles, and paradoxes in mathematics and physics are explained in this paper, taught by the author to the elementary and high school teachers at the University of New Mexico - Gallup in 1997-8 and…
Humor is an important social phenomenon, serving complex social and psychological functions. However, despite being studied for millennia humor is computationally not well understood, often considered an AI-complete problem. In this work,…
In a preliminary study of numerical humor, we propose the Perceived Specificity Hypothesis (PSH). The PSH states that, for nonnegative integers < 100, the funniness of a number increases with its apparent precision. A survey of 68…
This article contains a selection of problems from the American Mathematics Competitions.
Courses on the mathematics of gambling have been offered by a number of colleges and universities, and for a number of reasons. In the past 15 years, at least seven potential textbooks for such a course have been published. In this article…
This article is an expanded version of my talk at the Gathering for Gardner, 2012.
In this note some philosophical thoughts and observations about mathematics are expressed, arranged as challenges to some common claims.
Over the past 20 years, Wikipedia has gone from a rather outlandish idea to a major reference work, with more than 60 million articles across all languages, including nearly 7 million in English [Wiki01]. Around 27,000 of these articles…
We summarize four different versions of our course notes on the limits of mathematics.
Much previous work has been done in attempting to identify humor in text. In this paper we extend that capability by proposing a new task: assessing whether or not a joke is humorous. We present a novel way of approaching this problem by…
Presented here are over one hundred conjectures ranging from easy to difficult, from many mathematical fields. I also summarize briefly methods and tools that have led to this collection.
Herein we present one hundred inequalities culled from various corners of the probability, statistics, and combinatorics literature. We welcome new suggestions.
It is rare to succeed in getting mathematics into ordinary conversation without meeting all kinds of reservations. In order to raise public awareness of mathematics effectively, it is necessary to modify such attitudes. In this paper, we…
Sarcasm occurring due to the presence of numerical portions in text has been quoted as an error made by automatic sarcasm detection approaches in the past. We present a first study in detecting sarcasm in numbers, as in the case of the…
In this lecture I will talk about three mathematical puzzles involving mathematics and computation that have preoccupied me over the years. The first puzzle is to understand the amazing success of the simplex algorithm for linear…
This volume, \textbf{Physicists Are Still Joking}, serves as a definitive almanac of scientific humor spanning sixty years. It traces the evolution of professional folklore across geopolitical divides and technological eras. \textbf{Part I}…
In this paper a small survey is presented on fourteen sequences, such as: G Add-on Sequences, Sieve Sequences, Digital Sequences, Non-Arithmetic Progressions, recreational sequences (Lucky…
We report on an exploratory analysis of the forms of plagiarism observable in mathematical publications, which we identified by investigating editorial notes from zbMATH. While most cases we encountered were simple copies of earlier work,…
Aiming towards improving current computational models of humor detection, we propose a new multimodal dataset of stand-up comedies, in seven languages: English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Hungarian and Czech. Our dataset of more…
We propose a funny representation of SAT. While the primary interest is to present propositional satisfiability in a playful way for pedagogical purposes, it could also inspire new search heuristics.