http://people.csail.mit.edu/jaffer/YMBAMI
	You Might be a Mathematician if ...

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!"