The value of a class is never 100% educational – otherwise we could all read our way through the university bookstore and graduate. Here are some examples of why going to class can actually be fun! If you come across any quotes of your own, send them along to me and you may see them here!
Be sure to also visit the Textbook Quotes web site for fun moments in the homework realm.
Last updates: 19 December 2006.
| “Many of you made Standard Mistake Number 47 from the manual, which says ‘Always plug in the lower limit of integration, even when it's zero.’” |
| —Prof. Singer, MATH 223. |
| “That's one of those sentences that you can't say. Now, that doesn't mean you say it and then the world blows up; it just has no logical significance.” |
| —Prof. Alexander, MATH 304, talking about a paradox of self-reference. |
| “The number 3 is a real number, but i is imaginary. Like a unicorn. And if you're a scientist, you don't write about unicorns in scientific papers.” |
| —Prof. Singer, MATH 224. |
| “When you think of ‘degenerate,’ you think of someone in a back alley somewhere shooting up heroin and generally being a bad citizen... not turning in their homework on time....” |
| —Prof. P. Taylor, PHYS 221. |
| “I bet you didn't think about MATH 304 for a whole week. I don't know how anyone could do that, but I'm sure you managed.” |
| —Prof. Alexander, MATH 304, after spring break. |
| “A lot of the big names in statistical physics committed suicide. It's that kind of subject.” |
| —Prof. P. Taylor, PHYS 221. |
| “We're not just dealing with a right-hand side that's non-linear. We're dealing with a right-hand side that's downright freaky.” |
| —Prof. Singer, MATH 224. |
| “Let me go over what we did last time, because the weirdness coefficient was high on some of that stuff.” |
| —Prof. P. Taylor, PHYS 221. |
| “And the best way to simplify this is to... leave it the way it is.” |
| —Prof. Eck, PHYS 121. |
| “Let me eradicate all this gruesome stuff.” |
| —Prof. Singer, MATH 223, erasing the chalkboard. |
| “You have two possible motivations for doing that – one is to blow a lot of people up....” |
| —Prof. P. Taylor, PHYS 221, on helping uranium fission. |
| “What's the answer? 0.0067? But we're engineers, right, so that's just zero.” |
| —Prof. Grill, ENGR 210. |
| “I'm starting with a Greek Week extravaganza gone mad. Sigma, xi, omega – sounds like a place where they drink a lot of beer.” |
| —Prof. P. Taylor, PHYS 221, discussing names for subatomic particles. |
| “It's just some sort of a freak accident or a contrived example someone cooked up for a textbook... I'm exaggerating slightly.” |
| —Prof. Langer, MATH 224. |
| “Programmers write programs that don't work. They do that most of their lives.” |
| —Prof. Beer, EECS 345. |
| “Our horses are like sumo wrestlers.” |
| —Prof. Sahinalp, EECS 340, introducing a problem. |
| “Again, pause for dramatic effect – or sanity.” |
| —Prof. Beer, EECS 345. |
| “The probability of the algorithm sucking for a given input is very small.” |
| —Prof. Sahinalp, EECS 340. |
| “Well, now the life is easy.” |
| —Prof. Terdik, STAT 312. |
| “What's the dominant symbol of rap life? Women? But they don't call them women, usually....” |
| —Prof. Pfeiffer, ANTH 102. |
| “Let's have a look on this.” |
| —Prof. Terdik, STAT 312. |
| Professor: “Anything from the alliteration gallery? I call you guys the alliteration gallery because your names all start with vowels.” Student: “That's assonance.” |
| —Prof. Branicky, EECS 343. |
| “Those of you who are not asleep can take this time to quickly fall asleep before I begin the next stuff.” |
| —Prof. Shultz, EECS 314, during a break between topics. |
| “I don't obfuscate my code, I just stupefy it.” |
| —Prof. Branicky, EECS 343. |
| “There is something about computer science majors, and that is that none of them are funny.” |
| —Prof. Ozsoyoglu ("Tekin"), EECS 338. |
| “You guys are done with your biggest project. You just have one more little thing to do— Are you eating ravioli for breakfast?” |
| —Iris Dunkle, ENGL 398N, noticing something amiss in her 9:30 a.m. class. |
| “A black hole is the same no matter if it's a star that's collapsed into it or a huge ball of compressed Twinkies. You'll never know how it originated – you just know it's there.” |
| —Prof. Covault, PHYS 221. |
| “I'm not talking about numbers like 2,500,138; I'm talking about numbers with that many digits. Numbers that take a while to write down, that you can't see all of at the same time.” |
| —Prof. Singer, MATH 303. |
| “Maybe the engineers will come back and say ‘No, you really need baby seals.’” |
| —Prof. Podgurski, EECS 398M, in a discussion on design patterns. |
| “So I'm going to write things like 1 = 7, and that only makes sense if everyone in the room agrees that 6 is the same as 0.” |
| —Prof. Singer, MATH 303, on how sloppy he's going to be with notation. |
| “The cat sends the hiss message to the dog; the dog sends the bark message to the cat. Then the cat sends the bite message to the mouse, and the mouse sends the bubonic_plague message to the cat.” |
| —Prof. Podgurski, EECS 398M, drawing a UML sequence diagram. |
| “This is sometimes called universal algebra. ... It's true by general nonsense.” |
| —Prof. Singer, MATH 303. |
| “So if you wanted to prove Fermat's last theorem— Well, it's already been proved, so don't bother.” |
| —Prof. Singer, MATH 303. |
| “And I use Mathematica, which is far from optimized – it's almost pessimized.” |
| —Prof. Singer, MATH 303. |
| “Smalltalk was a very influential language, and some people even used it.” |
| —Prof. Podgurski, EECS 398M. |
| “It really wasn't going to be difficult to argue that they were big losers.” |
| —Prof. Podgurski, EECS 398M, on a court case in which he appeared as an expert witness. |
| “I can't apologize for Microsoft. There's only 10 minutes left and that would take weeks.” |
| —Prof. Podgurski, EECS 398M, during a lecture on software reliability. |
| “I will continually refer to this as ‘the CS problem,’ which is not to be confused with computer science. I am talking about critical sections, not computer science. This is a joke.” |
| —Prof. Ozsoyoglu ("Tekin"), EECS 338. |
| “Pappert is at MIT – or he was; I don't know if he's dead yet.” |
| —Prof. Branicky, EECS 391. |
| “You want your mail to be delivered on time. If it is slower even than the snail mail then you are screwed.” |
| —Prof. Wang, EECS 325. |
| “We have unrealized tonal spendor waiting to erupt.” |
| —Mr. Ferguson, APMU 383A. |
| “You couldn't tell, except for my manic behavior— I took a shower this morning, but I forgot the shampoo.” |
| —Prof. Branicky, EECS 391, on getting only an hour and a half of sleep the night before because he was writing a grant proposal. |
| “I think he did a few too many drugs. I think he lost a lot of brain cells.” |
| —Prof. Lori Levin, 11-721, about an MIT linguist. |
| “Anybody feel like they've stepped over the rainbow and everything's different? If you feel like that, raise your hand and say ‘I just flipped out.’” |
| —Prof. Lori Levin, 11-721. |
| “It's good to be aware that we are, in fact, cheating.” |
| —Prof. Bob Frederking, 11-711. |
| “Just a historical note – it's historical because it's in the Old English font.” |
| —Prof. Noah Smith, 11-762. |
| “I moved from state q to state q' and emitted symbol s, and all I got was this stupid T-shirt.” |
| —Prof. Noah Smith, 11-762, during a lecture on weighted finite-state transducers. |
| “If you don't save the girl and you don't save the city, it doesn't matter if you have nice meeting minutes.” |
| —Prof. Eric Nyberg, 11-791, about project management. |
| “You can break the rules a bit, but you have to pay for it. It's kind of like bribery.” |
| —Prof. Noah Smith, 11-762, explaining slack variables in loss functions. |