this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
1586 points (98.9% liked)

Programmer Humor

31239 readers
2035 users here now

Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)

Rules:

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee 145 points 1 month ago (1 children)

There's an old joke about two mathematicians in a cafe. They're arguing about whether ordinary people understand basic mathematics. The first mathematician says yes, of course they do! And the second disagrees.

The second mathematician goes to the toilet, and the first calls over their blonde waitress. He says to her, "in a minute my friend is going to come back from the toilet, and I'm going to ask you a question. I want you to reply, "one third x cubed.'"

"One ther desque," she repeats.

"One third x cubed," the mathematician tries again.

"One thir dek scubed."

"That'll do," he says, and she heads off. The second mathematician returns from the toilet and the first lays him a challenge. "I'll prove it. I'll call over that blonde waitress and ask her a simple integration question, and see if she can answer." The second mathematician agrees, and they call her over.

"My friend and I have a question," the first mathematician asks the waitress. "Do you know what is the integral of x squared?"

"One thir dek scubed," she answers and the second mathematician is impressed and concedes the point.

And as she walks away, the waitress calls over her shoulder,

"Plus a constant."

[–] nikaaa@lemmy.world 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I would not consider integration to be basic maths, honestly. Basic maths is addition and multiplication, and maybe vector geometry.

[–] milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee 9 points 1 month ago

You probably wouldn't consider x86 opcodes to be basic computer literacy either ;-)