Who says scientists can’t tell jokes? At The Loom, Carl Zimmer’s science blog, a geeky mathematical biology joke from Martin Nowak:

A shepherd is tending his sheep, and a man comes by and says, “If I guess the correct number of your sheep, can I have one?”

The shepherd says, “Please try.”

The man looks at the flock and says “Eighty-three.”

The shepherd is completely amazed that he got the right number. The man picks up a sheep and starts to walk away.

The shepherd says, “Wait! If I guess your profession, can I have my sheep back?”

The man says, “Sure.”

The shepherd says, “You must be a mathematical biologist.”

The man says, “How did you know?”

“Because you picked up my dog.”

[Note to mathematical biologists: if you’re telling a joke, the punchline really shouldn’t contradict what you’ve already stated in the build-up.]

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2 responses to “Picking Up Sheep”

  1. dearieme Avatar
    dearieme

    Four Cambridge academics are going to a conference in Edinburgh. The train crosses the border and the physicist says “Look, the cows in Scotland are black”. The mathematician says “No, at least one cow in Scotland is black”. The philosospher says “No, at least one side of one cow in Scotland is black”. The engineer says “But it’s a bull”.

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  2. Dom Avatar
    Dom

    A mathematics professor addresses his class: “Let X be the number of balls in the urn. Then the probability of picking a black ball, making appropriate assumptions, is equal to the total number of black balls divided by X.”
    An anxious student interrupts: “But what if X is NOT the number of balls in the urn?”

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