Grading Stories: "Cheese Weight" and Thusforthwith

One thing I love about the internet is being able to share stories and moments from everyday life. Here are a couple about something I'm sure other academics will be able to relate to: grading stories.

Cheese Weight

My alma mater enforced mathematical writing guidelines and the use of $\LaTeX$ very strongly. Yet some people, notably non-majors, chose to ignore those guidelines completely and complain when points were taken off for writing. Some people handed in scratch work done in pen on graph paper in consistently gigantic writing. Some people *coughEigenpetercough* printed out the questions in $\LaTeX$... two problems to one page, in landscape form... then did them out by hand in tiny writing. Some people *coughalsoEigenpetercough* did the homework in $\LaTeX$ but omitted large amounts of information to fit every proof-based problem on one side of one page.

Then there are the people with just plain bad handwriting. While grading with a friend, I encountered a homework that exemplified this while grading a core class; apparently, one of the people in the class was secretly a chicken tied to a Ouija board. Here's how it went down.

Me: Hey, do you have any idea what these two words are?

Friend: ..........

Me: It looks like it says "cheese weight".

Friend: It does, but that doesn't have anything to do with the problem.

Me: Can you tell from context?

Friend: .... no.... (to another person) Hey, do you know what this says?

Someone else: ..... looks like "cheese weight"?

Friend: How about you?

Yet another person: I have no idea.

Me: Well, "cheese weight" it is then.

And that's how someone got their work back with "what's a cheese weight?" written as a comment.

Runner-up for best handwriting-related mishap goes to the person who tried to write "I used Professor X's code," but botched the last two letters in "code" in a way that evoked, erm, Little Professor X.

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Thusforthwith!

As a fan of both analysis and silly things, I can't help but enjoy when they're combined. This story is about a friend who perfected this combination.

My friend, at the time, was taking the same real analysis course I was grading, so I mentioned to him how funny it was when people used archaic connecting words: "thusly", "wither" and the like. From there we started trying to come up with the most ridiculous word. Thenceforth! Thuswith! Whencehence!

So of course every homework I got from this friend had at least one made-up connecting word (despite being typed up quite nicely). This continued without incident, until one day:

Me: This is hilarious! I'm worried about you slipping up and doing it on the test, though.

Him: Why not?

Me: Well... the professor might notice, and you might get docked some points...

Him: Hmm...

Which obviously culminated in him PUTTING FAKE WORDS ON THE ANALYSIS TEST.

And guess what?

THE PROFESSOR DIDN'T NOTICE.

Jesus.

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Readers, do you have any grading stories? Let me know if anyone tries to pull off using fake connecting words---not everyone may be as lucky!

5 New High-Level Math Jokes

We here at the Analysisters enjoy puns, and are happy to contribute to the already-gigantic list of math jokes every once in a while. Here are some we've come up with over the years!

1. A topologist walks into $\bar A$. It's closed.

2. (3 variants) Q: If chocolate is a Hilbert space and peanut butter is its dual, why can every element in peanut butter be written as an inner product $\langle y,x \rangle$, where $y$, $x$ are chocolates and $x$ is uniquely fixed?
        A: Reese's Representation Theorem.

      Q: Why is peanut butter the adjoint of chocolate? Why is chocolate the adjoint of peanut butter?
      A: Reese's Representation Theorem.
      (Thanks, Paul!)

      Q: What's a mathematician's favorite candy?
      A: Riesz's Pieces.


3. What did the analyst have for dinner?
Limsup.

4. Your mama isn't Lebesgue integrable because she doesn't vanish at infinity!

5. Eight mathematicians walk into a diner. The first one says they're not hungry, and orders nothing. The next three order a beer, a hamburger, and french fries, respectively. The next three order a burger and fries, fries and a beer, and a burger and a beer, respectively. The last one orders a burger, fries, and a beer.

"I'm sorry, I can't fill your order," she says.

"Why is that?"

"This is only a partial order."

BONUS: Not necessarily in joke format, but I refuse to refer to
$$F_n = \frac{1}{\sqrt{5}}(\phi^n - \bar{\phi}^{n})$$
as anything except "that formula that shoots water up your butt".

Funny Papers: Overly Expressive Lab Mouse

Scientists are people too, and they have a sense of humor. We don't claim to be a research humor blog (that's what Annals of Improbable Research is for.) However, sometimes we come across something that is so hilarious it has to be shared.

In this case, it's a silly figure in a medical research paper. I doubt the legality of posting an image from someone else's protected academic work, so here's the source (Figure 2) and a short description of what's happening in the figure:

• The first image in the chain is a newly infected lab mouse with a darling smile on its little face.
• Endotoxins produce IL-12, TNF and IFN-gamma in the mouse, contributing to shock. The mouse's smile has been reverted; it is now unhappy at its predicament.
• The toxic shock leads to weight loss. Here, weight loss is manifested as someone copy-pasting an image of the sad mouse and shrinking it a bit.
• The poor mouse dies. The authors have helpfully put 'x's in the eyes and put the mouse's little feet up to communicate to the reader that the mouse is, indeed, dead.

A shout-out to C.A. Biron and R.T. Gazzinelli for demonstrating that, while mathematicians have the best jokes, experimental biologists have us completely beat on black humor!