Calculus Humor

Completely frivolous post.

OK, my Halloween “costume” at school this year was pretty lame, but I actually did put a minute amount of thought into it.

In case you can’t read the sign, it says $\int 3(ice)^2d(ice)$.  If you remember some calculus and treat ice as your variable, that works out to $ice^3$–An Ice Cube!  Ha!

But it gets better.  As there weren’t any bounds, adding the random constant of integration makes it $ice^3+C$ or “Ice Cube + C”, or maybe “Ice Cube + Sea”–I was really dressed up as an Iceberg.  Ha! Ha!  Having no idea how to dress like an iceberg, I wore a light blue shirt for the part of the iceberg above the water and dark blue pants for the part below the water.  I tried to be clever even if the underlying joke was just “punny”.

Then a colleague posted another integral joke I’d seen sometime before.  It has some lovely extensions, so I’ll share that, too.

What is $\int \frac{d(cabin)}{cabin}$?

At first glance, it’s a “log cabin.”  Funny.

But notationally, the result is actually $ln(cabin)$, so the environmentalists out there will appreciate that the answer is really a “natural log cabin.”  Even funnier.

The most correct solution is $ln(cabin)+C$.  If you call the end “+ Sea”, then the most clever answer is that $\int \frac{d(cabin)}{cabin}$ is a “Houseboat”.  Ha!

Hope you all had some fun.