Original source unknown.
A mathematician confided
That the M"obius band is one-sided
And you'll get quite a laugh
If you cut one in half
'Cause it stays in one piece when divided.
A mathematician named Klein
Thought the M"obius band was divine
Said he: If you glue
The edges of two
You'll get a wierd bottles like mine.
There was a young fellow named Fisk,
A swordsman, exceedingly brisk.
So fast was his action,
The Lorentz contraction
Reduced his rapier to a disk.
'Tis a favorite project of mine
A new value of pi to assign.
I would fix it at 3
For it's simpler, you see,
Than 3 point 1 4 1 5 9
If inside a circle a line
Hits the center and goes spine to spine
And the line's length is "d"
the circumference will be
d times 3.14159
A challenge for many long ages
Had baffled the savants and sages.
Yet at last came the light:
Seems old Fermat was right--
To the margin add 200 pages.
If (1+x) (real close to 1)
Is raised to the power of 1
Over x, you will find
Here's the value defined:
2.718281...
A burleycque dancer, a pip
Named Virginia, could peel in a zip;
But she read science fiction
and died of constriction
Attempting a Moebius strip.
This poem was written by John Saxon (an author of math textbooks).
((12 + 144 + 20 + (3 * 4^(1/2))) / 7) + (5 * 11) = 9^2 + 0
A Dozen, a Gross and a Score,
plus three times the square root of four,
divided by seven,
plus five times eleven,
equals nine squared and not a bit more.
In arctic and tropical climes,
the integers, addition, and times,
taken (mod p) will yield
a full finite field,
as p ranges over the primes.
A graduate student from Trinity
Computed the cube of infinity;
But it gave him the fidgets
To write down all those digits,
So he dropped math and took up divinity.
A conjecture both deep and profound
Is whether the circle is round;
In a paper by Erdo"s,
written in Kurdish,
A counterexample is found.
(Note: Erdo"s is pronounced "Air - dish")
I got this one from a book - whose name I forget. Also, it's not really a limerick - but it's close enough.
Here's an original by Chris Boyd, who sent it to me via email on 10-Feb-2006. Thanks Chris! Here it is:
4 + (6! - 0.5(12^2 + (403 + 1))) = 2(15^2)
Four plus the difference between
The factorial of six and the mean
Of twelve squared and four
Hundred three (plus one more)
Equals double the square of fifteen.
Classification of mathematical problems as linear and nonlinear is like classification of the Universe as bananas and non-bananas.
A law of conservation of difficulties: there is no easy way to prove a deep result.
"This is a one line proof...if we start sufficiently far to the left."
"The problems for the exam will be similar to the discussed in the class. Of course, the numbers will be different. But not all of them. Pi will still be 3.14159... "
Interesting Theorem:
All positive integers are interesting.
Proof:
Assume the contrary. Then there is a lowest non-interesting positive integer.
But, hey, that's pretty interesting! A contradiction.
http://www.math.utah.edu/%7Echerk/mathjokes.html - much of the material on this page comes from this site.
Date: 11-Feb-2006