In my experience with mathematicians, they all enjoy puns and silly jokes. My dad is always punning and even my math professors at college engaged in puns.
So in honor of mathematicians everywhere here are 10 classic math puns for your groaning enjoyment.
1) How do you prove in three steps that a sheet of paper is a lazy dog?
- A sheet of paper is an ink-lined plane.
- An inclined plane is a slope up.
- A slow pup is a lazy dog.
2) A geometer went to the beach to catch the rays and became a TanGent.
3) Lumberjacks make good musicians because of their natural logarithms.
4) Math puns are the first sine of weakness
5) Some math students are so clueless. They think General Calculus is a famous war hero!
6) If General Calculus actually did exist, he probably knew how to integrate his troops together and differentiate between his enemies and his allies.
7) Trigonometry for farmers: swine and cowswine.
8 ) A student tired of doing geometry told his teacher, “I’ll do algebra, I’ll do trig, and I’ll even do statistics, but graphing is where I draw the line!”
9) Q. What happened to the plant in the math classroom?
A. It got square roots
10) Asked how his pet parrot died, the mathematician answered “Polynomial. Polygon.”
Bonus) Ethan posted 10 math puns on this blog in the hopes that one would make someone laugh… but no pun in ten did. 
Which was your favorite pun?
Ethan,
Love ‘em! My math prof in college had a bunch of puns too, but at the moment I cannot remember any (I taught math for 3 years after college and I probably used some of his).
Here’s one I sent in to Rev. Fun a few years back about Noah and the snakes on the ark:
http://www.reverendfun.com/?date=20020319 (this date was the 2nd run of the same cartoon).
An engineer friend of mine followed that one up with Noah building a log table so that the adders could multiply, and so the cartoonist created a follow-up ‘toon a couple of days later. I can’t remember when mine first ran but it’s been a few years.
We love MUS and met your dad last week at the MPE conference in KC. Our daughter was too shy to speak with him! It was like meeting a rock star!!
Scott
I like the first one. Who has time to think of this stuff?
Um, number 8 is great…and the bonus was very punny.
Thanks for the smiles.
~Rose
Ethan,
We too were blessed through your Dad last weekend at the MPE conference. We attended 3 of his 4 workshops and the boys all got their books signed by him. It was like meeting someone famous, well, he is famous now, isn’t he? I was very impressed that he knew the meanings of our children’s names, even I forget sometimes, and we picked them primarily for the meaning, not the name itself.
I like#1 the best and#6 runs a close second. I know my math teachers used many puns, but I remember none of them. So I cheat. This one made me laugh.
“There are 10 kinds of mathematicians. Those who can think binarily and those who can’t.”
I ran across this one on a website whose name I can’t recall. It’s for Symbolic Logic aficionados:
Kleenelines is next to Goedeliness
referring of course to the famous math logicians Stephen Kleene and Kurt Goedel.
This one I myself have perpetrated (you need to know a bit of French):
There’s something fishy about the Poisson distribution.
Life without Geometry is pointless.
Does our math program have a corner on angles?
great puns! i could use these for my math project that involves math puns, so ty!