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(FYI: An engineer involved in Test and R&D would never do that. Budget, budget, budget!)
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True story: In high school I took a course covering Probabilities. Our instructor was known for his straightforward approach to teaching, presenting numerous probability problems and solutions over and over again prior to tests, scribbling them on the classroom’s front and side wall blackboards in one continuance operation before explaining what we were looking at. No mystery as to what exams would look like. One day, after completely covering both blackboards, he turned to us and said this: “If you ignore all of this and get an “A” on your next exam, then more power to you.” I guess that was his mathematician’s joke.
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“Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight! Pieces of seven! »squawk!« Parroty error!”
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How do you prove that a suitcase can hold an infinite number of hankies?
- Base case: Obviously, a single hankie will fit in a suitcase.
- Induction step: Ah well, just one more sure will fit!
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I like how a serious paradox for ancient philosophers becomes just a joke for students today. 
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“With the assumption that removing a single grain does not cause a heap to not be considered a heap anymore, the paradox is to consider what happens when the process is repeated enough times that only one grain remains and if it is still a heap. If not, then the question asks when it changed from a heap to a non-heap.”
I think the definition of “heapness” should be left up to our Australian brothers and sisters
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Ohhh… as a statistician being mildly obsessed about how pie charts often are not such a good idea to visualise your data, this is a very good one!
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This reminds me of the (not really a joke) math puzzler. Find the logical misstep in the following induction proof.
To prove:
All horses are the same color.
Base case: Consider a set of one horse. Clearly, one horse is the same color as itself, therefore a set of one horse is all the same color.
Induction step:
- Consider a set of N horses. Partition the set into a subset of 1 horse, call this horse i, and a subset of N-1 horses. By the inductive hypothesis, the N-1 horses are all the same color.
- Now re-partition the original set into a subset of 1 horse j ≠ i and a subset of the other N-1 horses. By the inductive hypothesis, the set of N-1 horses is all the same color, including, in particular, horse i.
- But we’ve previously established that j is the same color as all other horses in the set other than i. By the transitive property, horse i and horse j are thus the same color.
- Therefore, by the principle of mathematical induction, all N horses are the same color.
Now, where is the poison? The battle of wits has begun.
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Nothing rhymes with orange.
Nothing rhymes with purple.
Therefore, by induction, orange rhymes with purple.
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I was honestly confused by this. I think you must mean by the transitive property, not induction.
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