Academic Humor
At Calculated Risk there’s a bit about the “Comedy Session” at the American Economists Association annual meeting. Pretty slim pickins.
One of my favorite economist jokes is:
Two men are flying in a captive balloon. The wind is ugly and they come away from their course and they have no idea where they are. So they go down to 20 m above ground and ask a passing wanderer. “Could you tell us where we are?”
“You are in a balloon.”
So the one pilot to the other:
“The answer is perfectly right and absolutely useless. The man must be an economist”
John Derbyshire delivers, from time to time, math jokes. I particularly liked this one – although it’s a true story.
Once when walking past a lounge… filled with a large crowd watching TV, [Polish mathematician Antoni Zygmund] asked one of his students what was going on. The student told him that the crowd was watching the World Series and explained to him some of the features of this baseball phenomenon.
Zygmund thought about it for a few minutes and commented: ‘I think it should be called the World Sequence.
And ever since I read that I’ve referred to it as such.
I always like this one: