Sunday, January 20, 2013

Grad students

The following joke/riddle is a mathematician's way of disgusting potential future mathematicians, to see what the impact will be...

N grad students were sitting in a train compartment. They were discussing deep intellectual subjects (free food, math, free food, professors, politics, and the best places for free food), all the while eyeing a platter previously full of (free) meatballs, now containing six meatballs.  Each grad student had a fork and a knife, and was very aware of the fact that taking a meatball would be impolite, however much he/she wanted to. At that moment the train went into a tunnel and everything went dark for a couple of seconds. There was a loud yelp, and the light came back, revealing a platter containing a cut-off hand with a fork stuck in it.  How many grad students were there?


The answer might be at answersdiscarded.blogspot.com. Answer number 5.

3 comments:

  1. I'm completely baffled at how to start on this, but - s-seven, I guess, because one of the students got his hand cut off and didn't get a meatball? No clue.

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  2. The site you're giving (http://discardedlogic.blogspot.com/) doesn't have any posts in it, and I'm not sure it's yours. Are you sure that's the right URL? It's different from the 'answersdiscarded' you posted on before.

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  3. Yeah... oops. No that's not the right answer. Think again.

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