Dad: No, son, it wouldn’t be right.

Ralph: Well, you could try.

However, instead of 5 hours it would take 7 hours to get to New York. A little later, he announced that a second engine failed, and they still had two left, but it would take 10 hours to get to New York.

Somewhat later, the pilot again came on the intercom and announced that a third engine had died. Never fear, he announced, because the plane could fly on a single engine.

However, it would now take 18 hours to get to new York. At this point, one statistician turned to the other and said, “Gee, I hope we don’t lose that last engine, or we’ll be up here forever!”

“What are you selling?” I asked.

“Geometrical algebra drugs.”

“Huh!?”

“Geometry drugs. Ya got your uppers, your downers, your sidewaysers, your inside-outers…”

“Stop right there,” I interrupted. “I’ve never heard of inside-outers.”

“Oh, man, you’ll love ‘em. Makes you feel like M.C. ever-lovin’ Escher on a particularly weird day.”

“Go on…”

“OK, your inside-outers, your arbitrary bilinear mappers, and here, heh, here are the best ones,” he said, pulling out a large clear bottle of orange pills.

“What are those, then?” I asked.

“Givens transformers. They’ll rotate you about more planes than you even knew existed.”

“Sounds gross. What about those bilinear mappers?”

“There’s a whole variety of them. Here’s one you’ll love — they call it ‘One Over Z’ on the street. Take one of these little bad boys and you’ll be on speaking terms with the Point at Infinity.”

1. 39 percent of unemployed men wear spectacles
2. 80 percent of employed men wear spectacles
3. Work stuffs up your eyesight

1. All dogs are animals
2. All cats are animals
3. Therefore, all dogs are cats

1. A total of 4000 cans are opened around the world every second
2. Ten babies are conceived around the world every second
3. Each time you open a can, you stand a 1 in 400 chance of becoming pregnant

The priest put his head in the slot and the executioner pulled the lever; the guillotine blade came speeding down the track and stopped just a few inches above the priest neck. The priest proclaimed that God had intervened and saved him from execution; the executioner had to agree and let him go.

The mathematician had a disbelieving, puzzled, look on his face.

Next the Rabbi put his head in the slot, the executioner pulled the lever and the blade came speeding down the track and stopped a few inches above the Rabbi’s neck. The executioner agreed that God had intervened again and saved the Rabbi also.

The Mathematician, more troubled than ever, put his head in the slot and turned to look upward and he noticed something that made him smile.

Before the executioner could pull the lever, the mathematician said “Hold on there a minute, I see what the problem is! The track has a small pebble blocking the path of the blade”. He removed the pebble and announced, “There, it should work just fine now!”

2. They usually have long threatening names such as Bonferonni, Tchebycheff, Schatzoff, Hotelling, and Godambe. Where are the statisticians with names such as Smith, Brown, or Johnson?

3. They are fond of all snakes and typically own as a pet a large South American snake called an ANOCOVA.

4. For perverse reasons, rather than view a matrix right side up they prefer to invert it.

5. Rather than moonlighting by holding Amway parties they earn a few extra bucks by holding pocket-protector parties.

6. They are frequently seen in their back yards on clear nights gazing through powerful amateur telescopes looking for distant star constellations called ANOVA’s.

7. They are 99% confident that sleep can not be induced in an introductory statistics class by lecturing on z-scores.

8. Their idea of a scenic and exotic trip is traveling three standard deviations above the mean in a normal distribution.

9. They manifest many psychological disorders because as young statisticians many of their statistical hypotheses were rejected.

10. They express a deap-seated fear that society will someday construct tests that will enable everyone to make the same score. Without variation or individual differences the field of statistics has no real function and a statistician becomes a penniless ward of the state.

Most mathematicians are familiar with — or have at least seen references in the literature to — the equation 2 + 2 = 4. However, the less well known equation 2 + 2 = 5 also has a rich, complex history behind it. Like any other complex quantitiy, this history has a real part and an imaginary part; we shall deal exclusively with the latter here.

Many cultures, in their early mathematical development, discovered the equation 2 + 2 = 5. For example, consider the Bolb tribe, descended from the Incas of South America. The Bolbs counted by tying knots in ropes. They quickly realized that when a 2-knot rope is put together with another 2-knot rope, a 5-knot rope results.

Recent findings indicate that the Pythagorean Brotherhood discovered a proof that 2 + 2 = 5, but the proof never got written up. Contrary to what one might expect, the proof’s nonappearance was not caused by a cover-up such as the Pythagoreans attempted with the irrationality of the square root of two. Rather, they simply could not pay for the necessary scribe service. They had lost their grant money due to the protests of an oxen-rights activist who objected to the Brotherhood’s method of celebrating the discovery of theorems. Thus it was that only the equation 2 + 2 = 4 was used in Euclid’s “Elements,” and nothing more was heard of 2 + 2 = 5 for several centuries.

Around A.D. 1200 Leonardo of Pisa (Fibonacci) discovered that a few weeks after putting 2 male rabbits plus 2 female rabbits in the same cage, he ended up with considerably more than 4 rabbits. Fearing that too strong a challenge to the value 4 given in Euclid would meet with opposition, Leonardo conservatively stated, “2 + 2 is more like 5 than 4.” Even this cautious rendition of his data was roundly condemned and earned Leonardo the nickname “Blockhead.” By the way, his practice of underestimating the number of rabbits persisted; his celebrated model of rabbit populations had each birth consisting of only two babies, a gross underestimate if ever there was one.

Some 400 years later, the thread was picked up once more, this time by the French mathematicians. Descartes announced, “I think 2 + 2 = 5; therefore it does.” However, others objected that his argument was somewhat less than totally rigorous. Apparently, Fermat had a more rigorous proof which was to appear as part of a book, but it and other material were cut by the editor so that the book could be printed with wider margins.

Between the fact that no definitive proof of 2 + 2 = 5 was available and the excitement of the development of calculus, by 1700 mathematicians had again lost interest in the equation. In fact, the only known 18th-century reference to 2 + 2 = 5 is due to the philosopher Bishop Berkeley who, upon discovering it in an old manuscript, wryly commented, “Well, now I know where all the departed quantities went to — the right-hand side of this equation.” That witticism so impressed California intellectuals that they named a university town after him.

But in the early to middle 1800’s, 2 + 2 began to take on great significance. Riemann developed an arithmetic in which 2 + 2 = 5, paralleling the Euclidean 2 + 2 = 4 arithmetic. Moreover, during this period Gauss produced an arithmetic in which 2 + 2 = 3. Naturally, there ensued decades of great confusion as to the actual value of 2 + 2. Because of changing opinions on this topic, Kempe’s proof in 1880 of the 4-color theorem was deemed 11 years later to yield, instead, the 5-color theorem. Dedekind entered the debate with an article entitled “Was ist und was soll 2 + 2?”

Frege thought he had settled the question while preparing a condensed version of his “Begriffsschrift.” This condensation, entitled “Die Kleine Begriffsschrift (The Short Schrift),” contained what he considered to be a definitive proof of 2 + 2 = 5. But then Frege received a letter from Bertrand Russell, reminding him that in “Grundbeefen der Mathematik” Frege had proved that 2 + 2 = 4. This contradiction so discouraged Frege that he abandoned mathematics altogether and went into university administration.

Faced with this profound and bewildering foundational question of the value of 2 + 2, mathematicians followed the reasonable course of action: they just ignored the whole thing. And so everyone reverted to 2 + 2 = 4 with nothing being done with its rival equation during the 20th century. There had been rumors that Bourbaki was planning to devote a volume to 2 + 2 = 5 (the first forty pages taken up by the symbolic expression for the number five), but those rumor remained unconfirmed. Recently, though, there have been reported computer-assisted proofs that 2 + 2 = 5, typically involving computers belonging to utility companies. Perhaps the 21st century will see yet another revival of this historic equation.

The above was written by Houston Euler.

a + b = t
(a + b)(a - b) = t(a - b)
a^2 - b^2 = ta - tb
a^2 - ta = b^2 - tb
a^2 - ta + (t^2)/4 = b^2 - tb + (t^2)/4
(a - t/2)^2 = (b - t/2)^2
a - t/2 = b - t/2
a = b

So all numbers are the same, and math is pointless.

A statistician can have his head in an oven and his feet in ice, and he will say that on the average he feels fine.

Q. Did you hear the one about the statistician?
A. Probably….