Math humor

      Phyllis Diller (1917-20120), outspoken and funny, pioneering female comedian, died Monday, August 20.  Her self-deprecating humor was hugely hilarious -- and it helped the rest of us also not to take ourselves too seriously.

     In honor of Phyllis Diller and humor, I first offer a link to a "poem" from a favorite math-cartoonist -- Randall Munroe offers an amusing rhyming critique of the various majors (including math) available to undergraduates --  at xkcd.com.   And, below, I share several slightly funny math jokes adapted from ones found at Math Jokes 4 Mathy Folks and shaped into 4x4 or 5x5 syllable-square poems.

Poems starring mathematicians - 2

Published a century later than William Benjamin Smith's "The Merman and the Seraph" (see April 14 posting) we have Crossing the Equal Sign (Plain View Press, 2007)--a poetry collection by Marion Deutsche Cohen.  Cohen lives in Philadelphia and teaches mathematics at Arcadia University where she has used her literary interests to develop a new course, "Truth and Beauty: Mathematics in Literature."  I have chosen several excerpts from Cohen's collection that offer internal snapshots of  her sort of mathematician: