Math Pun!
In Pronzato and Walter's 1984 paper, "A General Purpose Global Optimizer", they adopt the unusual formal convention of indexing a sequence of vectors with a superscript to the left of the base variable. This leads to the following odd recursive formula:
This is funny because if you take sigma with no index to the starting value of the sequence, then this equation is a geometric recursion, and so is formally identical whether you associate the i-1 with the 0.1 (in which case it becomes an exponent) or with the sigma (in which case it becomes an index). It is a math pun!
If you interpret a pun simply as a formally ambiguous statement, then language puns are harder to make than math puns. In math, you really just usually need to leave out a few parentheses to make a statement that could be logically interpreted multiple ways. In English, this ambiguity is sufficient to make a pun, albeit a stupid one if the second meaning isn't actually related to the situation. But it's not so common, I think, to see mathematical formula that can be interpreted multiple ways in such a way that components fill completely different formal roles (here, indexation or exponentiation) but result in the same meaning. Such a pun is also hard to think of in English. Here's the best example I can think of right now, and it's not very good:
Campers after fighting off a bear with difficulty: "Man, that was a real bear."
This might qualify because "real bear" as in "genuine ursine mammal" and "real bear" as in "difficult situation" both convey the tough spot they just went through. But they're still different enough to make me feel unsatisfied. Can anyone think of a better example?
5 Comments:
I can't think of any math puns off the top of my head, but I was tickled when one of my professors told the "two-mathematicians-walk-into-a-restaurant joke in class recently.
I had to query my dad on this one, here's his response:
I had not thought about a pun in the form of an equation before, and I did not even quite understand the one Ryan gave. Here is one such pun I just thought of, though:
(As if this were some sort of revelation...) 1 = 1!
[Also true for 2, but not for n > 2.]
[Another kid in one of my high school math classes confused the use of '!' for factorial with reading a number with an expression of surprise.]
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As for the language puns, I suspect I have heard and told some, but the only one I can remember offhand having heard before is this one:
"Being stuck up in a tree, we called the fire department to rescue our cat."
[The dangling participle implies the caller, not the cat, is stuck in the tree. I remember discussing this with my Mom, when I was in grade school and my brother was in junior high.]
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Thinking about this reminded me of one of my favorite Funky Winkerbean comic strips. I don't remember the character names, but one was the "Class Brain" and one was the "Dumb Jock". Class Brain has been tutoring Dumb Jock on English grammar:
Dumb Jock: "You say 'noun' is a noun, and 'verb' is a noun. So what's what?"
Class Brain: "A pronoun."
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Finally, without spending too much time at it, I tried to think of a
language pun. If I understand the concept correctly, I submit this as an example:
Q: Do you pun often?
A: Oh, noun then.
['noun' sounds like 'now and', and 'now' is an adverb.]
I think you will have a hard time finding an example of "a formally ambiguous statement" in normal language -- unless you relax the rules a little. The reason I say this, is because the form of everyday language is expressed by modifying the words (such as "us" vs. "we", "who" vs. "whom") -- which means you'll have a hard time making a single word with the same meaning play a different grammatical role in two clauses whilst fulfilling the same meaning. but, I will have to continue pondering some examples...
Ok, we have a winner. A natural language pun where the formal pieces change the meaning of the clauses, yet the overall meaning remains:
what is he, the president?
what, is he the president?
"...and I did not even quite understand the one Ryan gave."
The explicit solution to the recursion is that the ith element will be 0.1 to the i minus first power times the starting value. Is that what he was missing?
And I agree! You have found an excellent meaning-conserving pun!
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