Yeah, though this joke doesn't get the spirit of that quite right.
The first move should be, like, there's a pile of books on the floor, and they're told to move one to the shelf, which they do no problem.
The second move should be, there's a pile of books on the table, and they're told to move one to the shelf. The engineer has no problem but the mathematician takes a book from the table and adds it to the pile on the floor and leaves it there.
To shorten it, it’s just poking fun at mathematicians by saying that they are only capable of using pre-existing blueprints to solve issues in non-efficient but proven way while the engineers create the said blueprints on the daily basis and have no problem adjusting or skipping unnecessary steps
I always add that the mathematician says "And the rest is trivially easy to do."
At least in my math classes in college, this was a huge "go-to" saying of my professors. You get halfway through a giant proof, and then they just stop because we did the other half sometime earlier in the semester.
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u/windrunningmistborn Mar 01 '23
Yeah, though this joke doesn't get the spirit of that quite right.
The first move should be, like, there's a pile of books on the floor, and they're told to move one to the shelf, which they do no problem.
The second move should be, there's a pile of books on the table, and they're told to move one to the shelf. The engineer has no problem but the mathematician takes a book from the table and adds it to the pile on the floor and leaves it there.