Tag: maths

The Maths Professor

The math professor just accepted a new position at a university in New York and has to move. He and his wife pack all their belongings into cardboard boxes and have them shipped off to their new home. To sort out some family matters, the wife stays behind for a few more days while her husband has already left for their new residence.

The boxes arrive when the wife still hasn’t rejoined her husband. When they talk on the phone in the evening, she asks him to count the boxes, just to make sure the movers didn’t loose any of them.

“Thirty nine boxes altogether”, says the prof on the phone.

“That can’t be”, the wife exclaims. “The New York Movers picked up forty boxes at our old place.”

The prof counts once again, but again his count only reaches 39.

The next morning, the wife calls the moving company and complains. The company promises to check; a few hours later, someone calls back and reports that all forty boxes did arrive.

In the evening, when the prof and his wife are on the phone again, she asks: “I don’t understand it. When you count, you get 39, and when they do, they get 40. That’s more than strange…”

“Well”, the prof says. “This is a cordless phone, so you can stay on the line and count with me: zero, one, two, three,…”

The professor and the plumber

A w:Plumber at work.

A professor of mathematics noticed that his kitchen sink at his home leaked. He called a plumber. The plumber came the next day and sealed a few screws, and everything was working as before.

The professor was delighted. However, when the plumber gave him the bill a minute later, he was shocked. “This is one-third of my monthly salary!” he yelled. “I could have bought one of these sinks online and installed it myself!”

Well, all the same he paid it and then the plumber said to him, “I understand your position as a professor. Why don’t you come to our company and apply for a plumber position?
You will earn three times as much as a professor. But remember, when you apply, tell them that you completed only seven elementary classes. They don’t like educated people.”

So it happened. The professor got a job as a plumber and his life significantly improved. He just had to seal a screw or two occasionally, and his salary went up significantly.

One day, the board of the plumbing company decided that every plumber had to go to evening classes to complete the eighth grade. So, our professor had to go there too. It just
happened that the first class was Math. The evening teacher, to check students’ knowledge, asked for a formula for the area of a circle. The person asked was the professor. He jumped to the board, and then he realized that he had forgotten the formula. He started to reason it, and he filled the white board with integrals, differentials, and other advanced formulas to conclude the result he forgot. As a result, he got “minus pi times r square.”

He didn’t like the minus, so he started all over again. He got the minus again. No matter how many times he tried, he always got a minus. He was frustrated. He gave the class a
frightened look and saw all the plumbers whisper: “Switch the limits of the integral!!”

Learning maths

A ten year old boy was failing math. His parents tried everything from tutors to hypnosis, but to no avail.

Finally, at the insistence of a family friend, they decided to enroll their son in a private Catholic school.

After the first day, the boy’s parents were surprised when he walked in after school with a stern, focused and very determined expression on his face, and went right past them straight to his room, where he quietly closed the door.

For nearly two hours he toiled away in his room – with math books strewn about his desk and the surrounding floor. He emerged long enough to eat, and after quickly cleaning his plate, went straight back to his room, closed the door, and worked feverishly at his studies until bedtime. This pattern continued ceaselessly until it was time for the first quarter report card.

The boy walked in with his report card — unopened — laid it on the dinner table and went straight to his room. Cautiously, his mother opened it, and to her amazement, she saw a bright red ‘A’ under the subject of MATH. Overjoyed, she and her husband rushed into their son’s room, thrilled at his remarkable progress.

‘Was it the nuns that did it?’, the father asked. The boy only shook his head and said, ‘No.’

‘Was it the one-on-one tutoring? The peer-mentoring?’

‘No.’

‘The textbooks? The teachers? The curriculum?’

‘Nope,’ said the son. ‘On that first day, when I walked in the front door and saw that guy they nailed to the ‘plus sign,’ I just knew they meant business!’