![]() I mean, I would listen to George Carlin and Steve Martin. I was in high school when I realized that I was curious about jokes. They were jobs from the 1700’s but certainly not useful anymore because everything had already been figured out.īut he said, "No, mathematics is actually an active, flourishing, modern science.”Īt that point I thought, “Sounds great. Because at that time I thought mathematicians were like blacksmiths. Norman Schide, my sixth grade teacher told me that mathematics was actually a job option. I'd never realized that it was a profession for a long time, though. I had always loved math ever since I was a kid. It was the safe choice and it made sense. But when I thought about math and comedy, I realized that I really should only be picking one, and I chose math. I thought maybe if this math PhD doesn’t work out, I've got a fallback plan. Möbius strip is a manifold with only one side.” “Hey, why did the chicken cross the Möbius strip? To get to the other side. Which is also a theorem, but the proof is very different.” But I misunderstood them and I proved that every IUD is a UFO. I mean, it’s pretty basic, right? Everybody knows every PID is a UFD. They asked me to prove that every principal ideal domain is a unique factorization domain. “So my algebra prelim, I was a little confused. ![]() One of our graduate students gonna tell us some jokes.” ![]() “Ladies and gentlemen, our next performer, Lew Lefton. We frankly don’t have a lot to do on a Saturday night on the central Illinois prairie. To an outside observer, the crowd looked probably engaged but subdued, but for us mathematicians this was energized. I was excited, a little nervous, but I was pretty sure my material would resonate like the eigenvalues of a linear operator, if you know what I mean. This set was an opportunity for me to collect all of those jokes together in front of a crowd that would get them. This was an intentional effort on my part to kind of reinvent the shy nerd who had come to graduate school to study math.Īs I was writing jokes for those shows, I often found myself writing a math joke and thinking, “A mathematician is the only one who’s gonna get that one,” so I'd throw it out. I had been doing stand-up for about a year in graduate school and I've had some success doing local clubs and open mics. So this was not my first time doing stand-up comedy, but it was my first time doing an entire stand-up comedy set consisting only of math jokes. And I, as a graduate student there for the very first time, decided to get up and do a stand-up comedy set. The event was the University of Illinois Department of Mathematics holiday party.Īfter the dinner, which was, I’m sure, chicken and corn in some form, there was a talent show. They were serving old style and big glass jugs of almond and burgundy. The loud corner, you could tell where the bar was. They were taking off their winter jackets and milling around. There was a nondescript cinderblock white banquet hall, about a hundred people inside. It was in Champaign, Illinois, on the outskirts of town.
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