More Math Humor
December 26th, 2005 by SplineGuy
I cannot take credit for this but found it downright hilarious. I hope it is appreciated.
There’ve been a lot of tropical storms/hurricanes this season–so many that they used up the standard names and had to begin using letters of the Greek alphabet as names. We’re up to Epsilon, now. The other day, an airplane went to the eye of that storm to gather data. They fell short of getting good data, but they were within Epsilon.
HA HA HA!! HT: Confessions and Cunctator
Yup … I don’t get it …
You really should provide an explanation for your “mathematically challenged” readers…
Are you sure? A joke explained is almost always ruined. But then again, a math joke such as this can’t possibly be less humorous to a person who doesn’t understand our language. It’s all greek to them, right?
It is common in various definitions in mathematics, particularly with respect to limits, to make the statement, “within epsilon.” As an example, one might have a rule or method that provides an approximation to some mathematical model. This approximation depends on some number, n. Let’s say as n gets large, the approximation gets better. We then say that for some arbitrarily small number, epsilon, we can take n large enough that our approximation is “within epsilon.”
Now, isn’t that much more humorous than before?
I was gonna say “Its all geek to me”. But then I thought better of it. And yeah, its tons more funny now.
Hee hee!