Life Of Navin

Another day, another email: This time from one of my good friends from the capital of India, Nayi Dilli. I'm simply copy-pasting it for your reading pleasure:


Hey Navin,

I found this site that gives some assorted quotes from professors in premier higher degree educational institutes. (read: Massachusetts Institute Of Technology) I found some of them absolutely hilarious, and I daresay those who are going abroad for higher studies can expect some really geeky humor. Here are some of the most hilarious ones:

The best way to do that is with… reagents that probably don’t
exist, which is why that’s not such a great way to do that.

After finishing his presentation:

Why is everyone watching me?

Titanic is just Romeo and Juliet. And an iceberg.

There are (N + f - 1)! / [N! (f - 1)!] ways to permute my balls.

The partition function is an animal which was invented in chapter 6.
It is not a fundamental animal, but it is a convenient animal.

When multiple metal atoms get together, their valence electrons run
wild, like kids in a hippie commune.

I won’t give you a transparent proof. I’ll give you the most obscure proof I can find.

That’s outside the scope of this course. That’s in the next course, which I'm pretty sure you won’t take.

This is a true fact, like all facts.

How many people don’t know omega is the cube-root of unity?

- a couple of hands go up

That’s a lie; I just told you.

When something is beautiful and elegant, it is of no help in actual computation.

“F” isn’t a function anymore. It’s just the letter that comes after “e”.

A finite plane is a very good approximation to an infinite plane.

My efforts to simplify it have led to complexifying it.

OK. I'll work on it, and you'll work on it, and we'll discuss it when it's too late.

It looks like the hypothesis has nothing to do with the solution. That makes a good theorem.

Set theory is ... the kind of muddy water where logicians like to swim in.

This proof requires some thinking. So let’s omit proving that.

At certain critical values of b, something terrible is going to happen.

These are Maxwell’s equations, and you can find them on any MIT T-shirt.

We do what mathematicians always do: we assume all physical constants are equal to 1. Well, except maybe the square root of 2 pi, but I usually assume the square root of 2 pi is equal to 1, too.

Let’s take a tube of toilet paper without the ends — this is often called a cylinder.

Before giving some twisted derivation:

There is no motivation for doing what we’re going to do.

Riemann wrote this in an eight-page paper around 100 years ago, and mathematicians have been trying to understand it ever since. Of course, it was written in German…

This is one of those things which you probably already understand but won’t after I’m finished explaining it.

We’ll call this one mu. Do you all know what mu is? If nothing else, higher education gives you a deeper understanding of greek.

While discussing multivariable max/min problems:

It’s obvious that there’s a maximum… it’s obvious to me, anyway, and I’m giving the lecture.

Oh my god, it’s working!

I misunderstood your question, but it was a good one.

If not a biggest element, then certainly an element than which no other element is bigger.

Clearly spoken by a computer science professor:

In digital systems you have to take into account things that almost work. And when I say `almost work’ I mean it doesn’t really work.

This would be visible if it were visible, but it’s not.

While calculating the number of expected childern a couple would have before they had a girl:

So a girl is like a system failure.

There is a point I want to make.

*pause*

That was my point.

No hardcore math people here…?

There was no reply

then I can get away with this.

Don’t worry, I can’t pass the exams either.

I’m not trying to say anything interesting

I have a feeling I must be a windbag, since my notes for this lecture
consist of 4 lines, and [in 44 minutes] I've only covered 2.

Look - a review session is just like sex. You can tell me what you want, and I’ll give it to you, or you can not tell me what you want, and you’ll just get screwed.

----------------------------------------------------------------

Rolling on the floor??

I Googled some of these quotes and stumbled upon the actual site where these quotes were first published. Its http://diswww.mit.edu/bloom-picayune.mit.edu/pqb/?1

Check it out.... there are quite a few good ones that I haven't posted here as well!!

What say??

BTW: This is my first post this year..... and before I forget......... HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

cheers!!