Math Humour

Who says mathematicians aren't funny? Here's a few samples of math jokes. Please e-mail me (mathlair@allfunandgames.ca) if you have other suggestions.

What did the southern acorn say when it grew up?
Gee, ah'm a tree.

Teacher: Johnny, use the word "announce" in a sentence.
Johnny: Announce is one-sixteenth of a pound.

There was once a mathematical horse. It learned arithmetic with ease, it could perform algebra easily, and it could prove theorems in Euclidean geometry, but, no matter how hard anyone tried to teach it, it could never grasp analytic geometry. What is the moral of this story?
You can't put Descartes before the horse.

There are three kinds of people: Those who can count and those who can't.

This site also includes four humourous mathematics-related essays written by Stephen Leacock, the first two of which are found in Literary Lapses: Boarding-House Geometry, The Force of Statistics, Mathematics for Golfers, and The Mathematics of the Lost Chord.

External Links

Inner City Maths Exam

Every so often, this exam winds up in the news because some (typically judgement-impaired) teacher gives it as a real exam to his/her students.

Math Cartoons (no longer online, view on archive.org.

More cartoons (Calvin & Hobbes):

January 7, 1986, February 3, 1986, March 24, 1986.