We all know that our professors come up with great things to say sometimes, but textbooks can be another great source of study-time humor. To prove it, take a look at these below! Has something in your latest reading assignment made you laugh? E-mail it to me and you could see it here!
Be sure to also visit the CWRU and CMU Professor Quotes web site for fun moments from inside the classroom.
Last updates: 23 July 2008.
| “The statement of Dilworth's Theorem is simple and beautiful, and it is a very pleasant exercise to interpret the statement of this theorem for a given poset.” |
| —Discrete Mathematics, Washburn, Marlowe, and Ryan, p. 238. |
| [After two pages of explanation:] “The only problem with the scheme we have described is that it won't work!” |
| —Modern Physics, Bernstein, Fishbane, and Gasiorowicz, p. 380. |
| “Part of the art of mathematics lies in pausing for a moment to find an elegant way to solve a problem rather than rushing in headlong with brute force methods.” |
| —Calculus, Edwards and Penney 5th ed., p. 869. |
| “After staring at this equation for a while (a couple of decades or so), we notice that, with poor eyesight, the left-hand side looks somewhat like what we get when we differentiate using the Product Rule.” |
| —Differential Equations, Blanchard, Devaney, and Hall 2nd ed., p. 114-15. |
| “We adapt his [Albert Einstein's] beautiful, simple, and powerful approach to calculate the rate of induced radiation.” |
| —Modern Physics, Bernstein, Fishbane, and Gasiorowicz, p. 376. |
| “Monosyllabic second aorist middle imperatives in -ou form mi verbs, when compounded with monosyllabic prepositions, retain the circumflex (prodou). If it is a disyllabic preposition, the accent becomes recessive (apodou).” [Say what? Is any of that in English?] |
| —Morphology of Biblical Greek, William D. Mounce, p. 56. |
| “If you still don't get it, then there is no hope for you when it comes to understanding averages and you might as well give up and become a sociologist.” |
| —Fundamentals of Polymer Science, Painter and Coleman 2nd ed., p. 19. |
| “You may shoplift, vacuum your apartment naked, smoke crack, or worship the devil for years, but so long as nobody knows about it – or at least nobody who is inclined to publicize this knowledge – it won't have much effect on your life.” |
| —Sociology, Lindsey and Breach 2nd ed., p. 203. |
| “I remember that date very well, because it was also the day I was arrested at my home for computer-related activities around my Intel contract, a series of felony charges for which I was later convicted.” |
| —Learning Perl, Randal L. Schwartz and Tom Phoenix, footnote p. xiv. |
| “They engage in interdisciplinary studies, such as psychohistory (the psychological analysis of historical characters), psycholinguistics (the study of language and thinking), and psychoceramics (the study of crackpots).” |
| —Psychology, David G. Meyers 6th ed., p. 8. |
| “The world would be a better place, May argued, if every young student were given a pocket calculator and encouraged to play with the logistic difference equation.” |
| —Chaos: Making a New Science, James Gleick, p. 80. |
| “The designer of a cryptosystem always has to take into account that at least in the long run the algorithm will be known by the cryptanalyst. For convenience of exposition we shall take him to be a highly intelligent bad guy; his name shall be Mr. X (see Figure 1.4).” |
| —Cryptology, Albrecht Beutelspacher, trans. J. Chris Fisher, p. 8. |
| “1. INTRODUCTION. In which we try to explain why we consider artificial intelligence to be a subject most worthy of study, and in which we try to decide what exactly it is, this being a good thing to decide before embarking.” |
| —Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Russell and Norvig 2nd ed., p. 1. |
| “For, we assume that differences in structure will generally correlate with perceived differences of meaning: so, rule (59) implies that a simple NP like [a boy] should be infinitely ambiguous according to whether it contains one, two, three, four, five... etc. non-branching N-bar constituents. But this is an absurd claim, and one which we shall treat with the contempt it deserves!” |
| —Transformational Grammar, Andrew Radford, p. 184. |
| “This theorem, that for any optimizing compiler there exists a better one, is known as the full employment theorem for compiler writers.” |
| —Modern Compiler Implementation in ML, Andrew W. Appel, p. 378. |