a age - american mathematical societya age readers are invited to submit original short amusing...
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What crazy things happen to you? Readers are invited to submit original short amusing stories, math jokes, cartoons, and other material to: [email protected].
1330 Notices of the AMs VoluMe 64, NuMber 11
Robert McCann reports that his young son Ian was looking for words beginning with “lem.” Robert responded, “Lemon, lemma, and lemniscate, although I don't know what that is.” Ian asked, “Daddy, are there mathematicians better than you who know what a lemniscate is?”
“All mathematicians live in two different worlds. They live in a crystalline world of perfect platonic forms. An ice palace. But they also live in the common world where things are transient, ambiguous, subject to vicissitudes. Mathematicians go backward and forward from one world to another. They’re adults in the crystalline world, infants in the real one.”—Sylvain Cappell
Concept and artwork by Anna Pun and Richard Stanley.