You Might be a Mathematician if ... ===================================================== humor humor humor humor ===================================================== You Might be a Mathematician if ... * at the age of 19 your most productive years are behind you; * your major result will be named for someone else; * your fame lies in posing the question you can't answer; * you count on your fingers in binary; * you can fold planar strips into regular polyhedra ... entirely in your head; * hypergeometric summations are the most fun you can have with your clothes on; * a copy of Russell's letter to Frege adorns your wall; * you remember postal addresses by means of number theory: "The smallest integer which is the sum of two cubes in two different ways"; * you understand all the mathematics Gauss produced ... through age 13; * the solution to every problem involves counting balls into boxes; * you have calculated how many ways (ignoring reflections) there are of lacing your sneaker; * you refuse to join any set that would have you as a member; * you are obsessed with the little combinatorics puzzles that arise daily; * you cannot refrain from blurting out counterexamples when someone claims an impossibility; * you make mistakes ... but they are really interesting mistakes; * doing something more than once is boring; * you suffer dental and gum disease because brushing teeth is boring; * because of your dental problems, mention of the word "calculus" raises mixed emotions; * you celebrate Rota's birthday decadently with donuts and champagne in paper cups; * you celebrate Erdös's birthday furtively with Benzedrine chased by a double espresso; * you celebrate Nash's birthday psychotically with LSD while pedaling a bicycle in figure eights; * your romantic relationship is strained when you show too much interest in your beloved's mathematician acquaintances; * unemployment is a welcome opportunity to make progress on your life's work; * it is difficult to plan for retirement given the current state of the continuum hypothesis; * you know a six-letter word with three vowels, all of which are "y"; * you wonder how Euler pronounced "Euclid"; * caffeine is one of your major food groups; * You are actually familiar with the techniques in "Pretty Poly Nomial and Curly Pi"; * your correspondence has footnotes and bibliography; * you have already obtained your next three years of reading material; * you learned French so you could read Bourbaki; * you bring Bourbaki's "Variétés Différentielles Analytiques Fascicule de Résultats" on vacation; * you don't bother taking vacations when you can read Bourbaki at home; * you visit Earth primarily for lectures and family obligations; * your progeny are alarmed to learn that Mathematics may be a heritable genetic trait; * your opinion of A Beautiful Mind is "been there; done that!" Copyright © 2002, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009 Aubrey Jaffer http://people.csail.mit.edu/jaffer/YMBAMI ===================================================== humor humor humor humor =====================================================