Another Joke, Re: Engineering jokes

[Dinh Thi Thanh Huong <huong@haiti.cs.uni-potsdam.de>]

'Look at this mathematician', said the logician 'He observes that the
first ninety-nine numbers are less than a hundred and infers hence, by
what he calls induction, that all numbers are less than a hundred'

'A Physicist believes', said the mathematician, 'that 60 is divisible by
all numbers'. He observes that 60 is divisible by 1,2,3,4,5 and 6. He
examines a few more cases, as 10, 20 and 30, taken as random as he says.
Since 60 is divisible also by these, he considers the experimental
evidence sufficient.'

'Yes, but look at the engineer', said the physisist. 'An engineer
suspected that all odd numbers are prime numbers. At any rate, 1 can be
considers as a prime number, he argued. Then there came 3,5 and 7, all
indubitably primes. Then there comes 9; an awkward case, it does not seem
to be a prime number, Yet 11 ans 13 are certainly primes. "Comming back to
9", he said, "I conclude that 9 must be an experimental error"'.

							George I'olya