Math Joke

A physicist, a mathematician, and an engineer stay at a hotel.

The engineer is awakened during the night by an acrid smell and gets up to investigate. He finds a fire burning in the hallway, sees a nearby fire extinguisher and after putting out the fire, goes back to bed.

Later that night, the physicist gets up, also because of the smell of fire. He steps out into the hall and assesses the situation. After doing the necessary calculations, he extinguishes the fire with minimal use of the extinguisher, and goes back to bed.

Later still, the mathematician awakens, and finds another fire in the hallway. The punchline has been left as an exercise for the reader.

The mathematician calculates the odds of three fires in the same hotel hallway in the matter of a few hours, determines they are so high that the fire is not real. As a control he calculates the odds that the fire extinguisher has been refilled a third time are as well impossibly high. He then goes back to bed.

Using recursive reasoning, the mathematician wakes up the physicist and the engineer, thereby reducing the problem to one where a solution already solved.

I looked up the answer.

BIG BANG THEORY JOKE
(A physicist goes to an ice cream parlour every week and orders an ice cream for himself and offers an ice cream for the empty stool sitting next to him. This goes on for a while until the owner asks him what he is doing. The man said “well I’m a physicist and Quantum Mechanics teaches us that it is possible for the matter above this stool to spontaneously turn into a beautiful woman who might accept my offer and fall in love with me” The owner says” well there are a lot of single beautiful woman come in here every day, so why don’t you buy an ice cream for one of them and they might fall in love with you”. And the physicist says “yeah, but what are the odds of that happening”!


I've noticed that there are a lot of jokes that are hard on engineers and physicist, but if there are multiple people in the joke, it is always the mathematician who is the butt of the joke.