Student: What does "equipollent" mean? Me: It means that the amount of pollen in the air is the same both inside and outside. S: ... S: Have you been planning that one for a while? Me: *sigh* Yeah. Just let me have this, ok?

Happy Fall Equinox Day, the day I tell the same joke I told six months ago, changing just one word.

S: What did you say the numbers on the integral sign are called? Me: Limits of integration S: Does that have anything to do with limits like we learned about before? Me, trying to stop myself from mentioning improper integrals to an absolute beginner: No.

Note that beginning a sentence with "Note that" is often unnecessary.

If students are not coming to your office hours even though they should, try legally changing your name to Generative AI. Then they can say they asked a Generative AI for help without fear of reprisal.

It's really hard to play Sudoku without the Law of the Excluded Middle

One of these things is not like the others, WolframAlpha

Thinking of changing my name to It'sOnTheSyllabus.

Yes, Dear Student, group theory certainly would be easier if Sylow p-subgroups of order p^k for k>1 always had pairwise trivial intersection.

A: Do you have any money? Me: Yes, I have any money.

Still in Australia. Forgot my credit card in my current apartment, so I paid for some groceries with cash. From the cashier's reaction, especially while they were fumbling for my change, I gather they hadn't seen actual currency in a very long time.

Saw a sign reading "Ambulant Male Toilet". I know perfectly well what it actually refers to, but my brain still pictured a masculine-presenting toilet walking around causing trouble.

Listening to a talk by a New Zealand mathematician. Forty minutes in, I finally realize he is saying "hole" not "hull". The talk makes so much more sense now.

To cover that great theory would be my fondest hope Were it not that of this course it's far beyond the scope -- Tom Lehrer (1928-2025), introduction to "The Derivative Song"

So far my Australia trip is going well. My collaborators and I have proven many excellent theorems. We then constructed excellent counterexamples to those same theorems.

With regard to coauthorship, I have honestly never minded being an et al

I'm in Australia for the first time. So far, it's basically like the US except everything is backwards: they drive on the left side of the road, drains spin clockwise, and the language is written right to left

Just realized that all the gf's I see on restaurant menus are not referring to the chef's girlfriends

I just typed \bugskip into my LaTeX document. If it actually existed, that would be a very useful command.

I just now said that the trail we are hiking is highly nontrivial and my family stopped and stared at me

If I end up getting into heaven, I'll probably just rent out my heavenly apartment and reside somewhere else.

My commitment to relativism is absolute

It is possible that the reason my opinions about movies raise eyebrows is that over the last several years, I have only watched movies on long flights. For example, people seem not to like my theory that the soundtrack of every film is pervaded by a loud rumbling sound.

Me, in an email to a coauthor: With revision come new opportunities for errors. You will undoubtedly discover this for yourself when you read the latest draft.

I dreamed I was walking on the beach with Mathematics. I asked: "You said that if I followed you, you'd walk with me all the way. But sometimes there is only one set of footprints." Mathematics replied, "Those are the times your conjectures were so wrong, you walked right into the ocean."

If MathSciNet and Zentralblatt are to be believed, the adjective "plethoric" has never been used to name a mathematical concept. I guess I have a plan for what remains of my career.

Email from academia dot edu: Are you the Michael Kinyon who was cited in a paper by [...]? Me: You forgot to mention "...who is also a genius and jaw-droppingly handsome as well." Academia dot edu: If we do say that, will you sign up with us for a full year? Me: No

Every morning when I put in my hearing aids, they let me know when my phone has found them: "Connected!" Except it's a bit cut off, so it sounds like: "Dead!" And I always have the same thought: Only inside, hearing aids. Only inside.

"I'd like to thank the conference organizers for the opportunity to speak" "My question is more of a comment, really" "OK, it's time for the conference photo. Come on, stand closer together. Why are the tall people in the front?"

Yes, dear speaker, having 10 slides for a 15 minute talk should have been fine, but you spent 7 minutes on slide 3, so it's not clear what you were expecting.

Just accidentally typed \bigship instead of \bigskip into my LaTeX file and I was disappointed that neither an oil tanker nor a relationship between two fictional characters appeared in the PDF.

I just put the word "behooves" in one of my talk slides, so it's a pretty good day so far.

I just hope it's also injectivtive so then it would be bijectivtive. (I probably made this typo, but I'm still going to blame my coauthor.)

Loops were named as such by A.A. Albert, who, except for some postdoctoral time at Princeton and Columbia, spent his career at the U. of Chicago. He needed a term to distinguish quasigroups with an identity element from those without one. "Loop" is short and rhymes with "group". :) (1/2)

TIL the proof of Lagrange's Theorem for finite Moufang loops is WAY HARD: Proved in 2005 zbmath.org/1102.20049 using: -reduce to simple loops zbmath.org/1039.20037 (thx @profkinyon.bsky.social) -octonions over finite fields -Moufang loops "=" groups w/ triality zbmath.org/1447.20002 -CFSG #🧮

Mathematicians' afterlife options: St. Peter: Welcome to Heaven, here's your Hagoromo chalk that never gets any shorter and your microfiber eraser Devil: Welcome to Hell, here's your black whiteboard marker without a cap and a paper towel

I got tired of naming all my files "tmp" and putting them in folders named "misc". So I finally got organized. Now my files are named "bah" and I put them all in a folder named "humbug"

A trapeze is just a trapezoid with only one object.

I keep unintentionally switching back and forth between first person singular and first person plural in this abstract we are writing.

If you're the type of mathematics teacher who likes to give exercises requiring exact values of trig functions, but is bored with the old 30°-45°-60° grind, then the Ailles rectangle may be for you! (Seriously, this thing is why I can write down sin(15°), cos(75°) etc without using identities.)

It used to be that when I would make a mistake during a lecture and a student would catch me, I would say "Oh yes, that's a chalko. A chalko is a typo you make with chalk." Now my university only has whiteboards with markers, so instead I say "Oh yes, that's a marko...." It just isn't the same.

Preparing a talk for an audience with no background in the topic, so I'm using a lot of with "recall"s and "as you well know"s to gaslight them.

I never "um, actually" anyone, regardless of what they assert. I "in fact" them.

One reason my back often hurts is that someone won't allow me to push my chair closer to my desk

I've seen the same typo ("moniod") so many time in this paper I'm line-editing that it's starting to look correct.

My students have accused me of having boring title slides so here is what I am using today.

Started to read an article the provocative title "Should We Fear Derivatives?" before discovering a couple of paragraphs in that it was about financial derivatives.

"If you like, it is magic."

Mathematicians will say "with respect to" in reference to some mathematical object (as in "derivative with respect to x" and many more examples) more easily than they will offer respect to other people.

We are visiting eastern Utah for the long weekend. This is the Great Hunt, a petroglyph located in Nine Mile Canyon. It is believed to have been created by the Fremont people (ca 950-1200 CE). The depicted animals are bighorn sheep, probably during the fall mating season.