Joke Quotes (16)
A good mathematical joke is better, and better mathematics, than a dozen mediocre papers.
A Mathematician's Miscellany (1953). In Béla Bollobás, Littlewood's Miscellany (1986), 24.
A metallurgist is an expert who can look at a platinum blonde and tell whether she is virgin metal or common ore.
In Evan Esar, 20,000 Quips and Quotes, 703.
After two days in the hospital, I took a turn for the nurse.
Attributed.
Arithmetically speaking, rabbits multiply faster than adders add.
In Evan Esar, 20,000 Quips and Quotes, 509.
See also: | Mathematics (217)
In mathematics, fractions speak louder than words.
In Evan Esar, 20,000 Quips and Quotes, 509.
See also: | Mathematics (217)
Making out an income tax is a lesson in mathematics: addition, division, multiplication and extraction.
In Evan Esar, 20,000 Quips and Quotes, 419.
Mathematics is strange: many make thousands but not many make millions.
In Evan Esar, 20,000 Quips and Quotes, 250.
One of the first things a boy learns with a chemistry set is that he'll never get another one.
In Evan Esar, 20,000 Quips and Quotes, 128.
See also: | Chemistry (85)
Organic chemistry is the study of organs; inorganic chemistry is the study of the insides of organs.
Barefoot Boy with Cheek (1943), 129.
People do more talking than listening: under the law of gravity, it takes more energy to shut one's mouth than to open it.
In Evan Esar, 20,000 Quips and Quotes, 267.
See also: | Gravity (32)
Professor, how can you bring yourself to enter this chemical building that has Ionic columns?
[Kahlenberg, a physical chemist, was an opponent of ionic theory.]
[Kahlenberg, a physical chemist, was an opponent of ionic theory.]
Quoted in R. Desper, The Human Side of Scientists (1975), 106.
See also: | Theory (170)
The most difficult problem in mathematics is to make the date of a woman's birth agree with her present age.
In Evan Esar, 20,000 Quips and Quotes, 22.
The only place where a dollar is still worth one hundred cents today is in the problems in an arithmetic book.
In Evan Esar, 20,000 Quips and Quotes, 509.
These parsons are so in the habit of dealing with the abstractions of doctrines as if there was no difficulty about them whatever, so confident, from the practice of having the talk all to themselves for an hour at least every week with no one to gainsay a syllable they utter, be it ever so loose or bad, that they gallop over the course when their field is Botany or Geology as if we were in the pews and they in the pulpit ... There is a story somewhere of an Englishman, Frenchman, and German being each called on to describe a camel. The Englishman immediately embarked for Egypt, the Frenchman went to the Jardin des Plantes, and the German shut himself up in his study and thought it out!
Letter to Asa Gray (29 Mar 1857). Quoted in Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker (1918), Vol. 1, 477.
We already have anions and cations and now the biochemists and nutritionists are speaking of rat-ions.
Quoted in R. Desper, The Human Side of Scientists (1975), 106.
See also: | Biochemist (2)
You can't go by mathematics: the dollar you borrow is never as big as the dollar you pay back.
In Evan Esar, 20,000 Quips and Quotes, 240.
