A mathematician, a physicist and an engineer are led into a long room. At the other end stands a beautiful naked woman. “When I ring this bell,” she says" you may cross half the space between us. When I ring the bell again, you may again cross half the space between us." Both the mathematician and physicist groan and wander off. “Ah, it’s Zeno’s paradox, we can never actually reach her.” The engineer, waiting for the bell, says “I think I can get close enough.”
why is there a naked woman?
For the joke to work.
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Nope, had to be cakes out, specifically to piss off the people who get angry when they detect something men stereotypically enjoy.
Actually everyone listed in the joke is a lesbian…
Cakey snatch isn’t exactly my preferred choice but when in Rome.
i still don’t see what the point is.
Because a sexual relationship requires 2 people to touch, so it is a relatable setup.
yeah but like, you don’t need to specify that one individual is naked. If that’s a required factoid of the statement, the engineer, mathematician, and physicist should also be naked. But there’s no mention of that.
Now i don’t have much experience in relationships, particularly inter personal ones, but to my knowledge, you are generally clothed most of the time.
You are overthinking it. This is just a premise to setup the joke that an engineer deals with approximation while the other two give up because they’ll never reach 0.
It could be a bowl of ice cream for all that matters, but people like corny jokes, so that’s it.
no i understood that part. Unless the naked woman has something to do with that part of the joke itself, then i don’t know why it’s mentioned.
Were you neutered as a child?
no i just don’t fucking understand why the naked woman matters here.
Could be fucking anything, a pile of a billion dollars. Three turtles, or a goat, it’s the same joke.
I don’t think it’s the same joke when it’s three turtles or a goat, because the joke is “I think I can get close enough…to engage in unspecified sex acts with this woman.”
You think the same chemicals that turned the frickin frogs gay is responsible for this aversion to sexual thoughts? “Could it not be a naked woman? That clutches my pearls.”
“I think I can get close enough…to engage in unspecified sex acts with this woman.”
that’s what i would assume, but then again it never states anything, so this is like walking into a fucking storage shed and seeing a colonoscopy going on. It’s just fucking weird.
Exactly, it’s the same joke regardless so why get bent out of shape over it?
i mean yeah, i guess so, but that’s not what im confused over.
I just want to know why specifically it was written with a nude woman? It never alluded to anything in particular.
It could be a research grant.
engineers love research grants, well known behaviorism of an engineer.
Could be fucking anything
Like a naked woman.
i mean yeah, that’s one of the options. Could also be an orphan source.
The engineer will never reach her, but his boner will.
im pretty sure most people have arms. An engineer almost certainly does.
Because humanity has no other desires between math and tits apparently.
Can confirm.
(I’m both a mathematician and a pervert)
and yelling at people who don’t understand, apparently.
I’ve committed the most heinous of crimes according to the internet, not understanding the joke.
Sorry i’m autistic lmao.So, I understand why there is a naked woman in the joke, what I don’t understand is her motivation.
Don’t you know women are objects and have no motivations. /s obviously
man i didn’t even fucking try asking that question, i was just concerned about the roots of the hypothetical presented.
Sexism, obvs
that’s a possibility.
Only straight men are mathematicians, physicists and engineers. This is why the joke is framed this way.
See: responses from OP, valiantly defending his choice to “piss people off”, instead of noticing the joke is just yet another reminder that men are default.
After all, sexism is over, and STEM isn’t hostile to women/non-heteronormative people. It’s all in our head.
What a .ml tier comment lmao
Yay we got instance racism in lemmy!
When they can learn to behave themselves and stop giving the dumbest takes in every discussion, they can have my respect back.
I know, he wrote a shit comment. But yea most people took random instances
Hi there friend, I am here to inform you that many woman also like the titty. Gay girls exist my friend, and the gender of the three professionals is never specified.
I’ll assume ya ain’t trying to be homophobic my buddy but I hope you keep that in mind for future refference.
Edit racism comment was another guy, sorry, very tired
I’m not going to spend much time engaging with your comment because you didn’t read mine well.
I did not mention race.
I included mention of gay folks (see non-heteronormative). The “joke” doesn’t work unless the stem major desires being very close to a naked woman, so I don’t find your mention of gay men to make sense.
You did a racism. You did an imperialism. You did a nationalism. You did a xenophobia. You did a white fragility. You did a weak apology. You did no growth. This makes it abundantly clear you don’t understand the intersectional nature of the multiplicity of your offenses
/s
that’s the vibe i’m getting, but it’s a really fucking weird premise for a hypothetical regardless.
“there are a fisher, a farmer, and a welder in a bar, on the other side is cthulhu” is basically how it’s worded
Also mathematicians: here’s this cool new thing, I called it “infinitesimal”
In computer engineering we have positive and negative zero.
Also in Math.
Unknowingly from the GP, that’s exactly where CE got it from.
What is gp/ce?
Grand parent / computer engineering
What algebra uses negative 0?
When taking about limits, you can approach 0 from the positive or negative direction, which can give very different results. For example, lim cotx, x->0+ = ∞ while lim cotx, x->0- = -∞
Speaking as a mathematician, it’s not really accurate to call that -0.
Yes, but it is infinitesimally close.
You also can’t call something infinity. People call stuff names. It is just important that they define their terms well enough.
You also can’t call something infinity
Why do you think that?
IEEE 754
I mean it’s an algebra, isn’t it? And it definitely was mathematicians who came up with the thing. In the same way that artists didn’t come up with the CGI colour palette.
I’m not familiar with IEEE 754.
Edit: I think this sort of space shouldn’t be the kind where people get downvoted for admitting ignorance honestly, but maybe that’s just me.
It’s a wonderful world where 1 / 0 is ∞ and 1 / -0 is -∞, making a lot of high school teachers very very mad. OTOH it’s also a very strange world where x = y does not imply 1 / x = 1 / y. But it is, very emphatically, an algebra.
Mostly it’s pure numerology, at least from the POV of most of the people using it.
I’ll need to look at it more; it sounds interesting.
IEEE 754 is the standard to which basically all computer systems implement floating point numbers. It specifically distinguishes between +0 and -0 among other weird quirks.
You probably are familiar with the thing, just not under that name, and not as a subject of mathematical study. I am aware that there are, at least in theory, mathematicians never expanding beyond pen+paper (and that’s fine) but TBH they’re getting kinda rare. The last time you fired up Julia you probably used them, R, possibly, Coq, it’d actually be a surprise.
They’re most widely known to trip up newbie programmers, causing excessive bug hunts and then a proud bug report stating “0.1 + 0.2 /= 0.3, that’s wrong”, to which the reply will be “nope, that’s exactly as the spec says”. The solution, to people who aren’t numerologists, is to sprinkle gratuitous amounts of epsilons everywhere.
Math is more than just the set of all algebras.
I’m aware. Algebra is what I’m most interested in, and so when someone says “0” I think “additive identity of a ring” unless context makes the use obvious.
Edit: I’ve given it some thought, and I’m not convinced all algebras can fit in a set, because every non-empty set can have at least one algebra imposed upon them, and so the set of all algebras must have cardinality no less than the proper class of all sets. We also can’t have a set of all algebras (up to isomorphism) because iirc the surreal numbers are an algebra imposed on a structure that itself incorporates a proper class, and is thus incapable of being a set element.
Depends, I’d say. Is your set theory incomplete or inconsistent?
What do you mean? In two’s complement, there is only one zero.
IEEE 754 floating point numbers have a signed bit at the front, causing +0 and -0 to exist.
Specifically I was referring to standard float representation which permits signed zeros. However, other comments provide some interesting examples also.
Who use ones complement?
I assume no one at this point
I think 1’s complement only existed to facilitate 2’s complement. Otherwise its stupid
floats
1- 0,99999…
Floating point numbers are not possible in two’s complement, besides that, what is your point? 0,99999999… is probably the same as 1.
Yes, mathematically it’s the same, but in physics there’s a guy named Heisenberg who denies that 0.99999… really gets to 1. There is always this difference, for a mathematician infinite is not a problem, but for a physicist it is, plus a very big one.
True, it sounds like that might be a problem if we consider that physics has to be between math and computer science.
(Have a nice day)
And, as a mathematician who has been coding a library to create scaled geometric graphics for his paper, I hate -0.0.
Seriously, I run every number where sign determines action through a function I call “fix_zero” just because tiny tiny rounding errors pile up in floats, even is numpy.
Limit x->0 { x } = 0 ? Noway
Wait do you actually say “limit” instead of “limes” in English?
Yes, as in “Why can’t I hold all these limits?”
I usually uses lim
Yes.
Yeah, I was gonna say… Calculus is all about saying it’s infinitely approaching zero so let’s assume it is zero.
sin(x) ~= 0cosmologists: sin(x) ~= 10
i mean, mathematically speaking, every number that isn’t zero, is further away from zero, than the number before it.
So there is a point to the statement of “approaching zero” as well “near zero” and “about zero” since 100 probably isn’t about zero.
Also CS nerds would like to fight you about floating point values.
Whoa slow down there buddy. Proposing numbers before numbers like they are a given.
as far as we can tell, mathematically, they are a given, and they never stop.
I’ll wait for you to find the end of pi.
I’m not saying the numbers stop. But there are numbers where concepts like “closer to zero” or “number before [another number]” don’t apply.
For example There is no sensible way to define a less-than for the complex numbers and thus they can’t be ordered.
i would argue that you can probably independently define an ordering mechanism. And then apply it.
You can just pretend that 100 is 0. I see no reason this shouldn’t apply to everything else.
What do you mean by independent? There is no more general and independent notion of ordering than a less-than operator. The article above oulines a mathematical proof that no such definition exists in a consistent way for the complex numbers.
“small but non-zero” is one of my favorite phrases 😅
I like Paul Erdős’s usage of “epsilon” to refer to children
The infinitesimal has entered the chat.
lets ignore the higher order terms for now. five lines below look at this beautiful exact equality that we got
What about large values of zero?
Trivial
~ ∞
