When I was an undergraduate, the Department library had a pinboard, displaying the standard kind of random maths snippets. There were two that I remember, and have pondered on and off about the origins (which were not clear, even at the time). One snippet was a couple paragraphs from a novel, with a plane crashed in the desert or something. The survivors didn’t know which way to walk for the safety of Town X, and it was remarked by one of them that if they just chose a direction at random they would have one chance in 360 of getting to safety. (It sounds a little like Flight of the Phoenix, and I think someone told me that the 1/360 thing did also occur in a movie, but I don’t think it occurs in that movie.)
The second snippet was a full short “article”, a parody of pure mathematics and in particular the forest of definitions with which one is confronted in subjects such as point-set topology. I remembered the article as a very funny Dada-ish thing, and have hunted for it on occasion. That was difficult, since I didn’t remember much about the article except that there was a “husk” and something was “uproarious”. But search engines are getting better, of course, and this time, a few weeks ago, I found it.
The article appeared in the University of Waterloo student newspaper, in 1983. That didn’t fit with my reading the article in the late 70s, but the UoW appearance also seemed clearly to be a reprint from somewhere else, and there was an indication of the origins in the references. The article (presumably) first appeared in 1968, in Mathematics Magazine, real author unknown. And, sixty years on, I doubt anybody cares anymore, so here is the article.
‘After some manipulations we obtain 1/3 = 1/3’. 😆
It took me until “…define class of connected snarfs…” to twig what was happening here.
Very clever (and also sad that such humour is welcomed much less in the modern education spaces)
I remember that in the mathematics library at one university had several pillars in the space. The librarian had collected scraps of paper with mathematical scribbles from rubbish bins and pasted them on the pillars. A nice touch.
I do like libraries.
More library memories have come flooding back to me.
I went into a mathematics library where all the books were ordered by accession numbers; the oldest was #1, the latest addition was #n. I asked one of the mathematicians if ever anyone had thought of ordering them by subject. He said yes that had been suggested, but the mathematicians knew the locations of the books that interested them and didn’t want any change. Anyway, if you wanted something specific you could always look it up in the card catalogue. (But browsing books say on differential equations was not possible.)
I went into a mathematics library in France where all the books were ordered alphabetically by author. I recall that there was a long row of books by Bourbaki.
A bit like Marty’s post – when I was overseas looking for a job back home, my father would send me advertisements for jobs. One was at a university looking for a “Hilbert space operator”. It used all the mathematical jargon sensibly and it read well. I guess that somebody got into trouble for this. Even my father (who was not a mathematician) noted “Is this real?”
That job ad is hilarious.
Thanks, Terry. Yes, I also love libraries. The current death and destruction is really depressing.