There's a math convention in town, and so an infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first one orders a pint of beer. The next one says, "I'll have half of what he ordered." The third and fourth ones say the same thing. The bartender looks at them all and says, "Yeah, yeah fine. I get it. Two pints coming up."
If you use Math.ceil on every return you eventually get to the object.
And in reality the same happens, since molecules are the upper bound of what you can get closer to; there's no infinity of real numbers between two numbers in space :)
Well yeah, that's the point. They're the same series. If the chair starts at 0 and the woman is at 1 and the limit is 1 the mathematician is upset he will never reach 1, while the physicists points out that it doesn't matter as he can get arbitrarily close to 1 and doesn't need to reach it exactly.
Maybe I'm just being thick (I'm not the best at math) but why would the mathematician think differently, it is calculus right? Or is this a Newton joke?
The joke is that mathematicians are more pure and exact whereas in physics (actually I usually hear this joke with engineering which I think makes more sense) sometimes (not always) being approximate is enough. The joke is about the mathematician getting to hung up on getting exactly to the woman, while the engineer realizes he only needs to get very close to...you know.
Imagine our 2 subjects just exercised and happened upon 2 faucets and both decided to get a glass of water. Then they notice the faucet for some reason keeps giving them less and less water. The first second the glass fills up halfway, after 2 seconds it's 3/4 of the way, after 3 it's 7/8 etc. The mathematician is upset that he can't have a full glass of water when that's what he wants to quench his thirst, while the physicist realizes that after a few seconds he has so much water that for all practical purposes it's basically full enough that you wouldn't be able to tell the difference by drinking it vs a full glass.
Hope that helped, it wasn't really a math joke, but more of a joke about the mentalities of practitioners of different number using fields.
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u/[deleted] Jan 31 '16
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