Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Hi,
This is a compilation of humorous quotes from people (mostly lecturers) at
Oxford and Cambridge. I found them all on Web.
Yours,
Gautam.
OXFORD
1989
This lecturer seems to have a tautology problem:
• "A mapping is 1-1 and onto if and only if it is 1-1 and onto."
A disillusioned lecturer:
• "In the old days, the pure days..."
A befuddled lecturer:
• "Is this the right lecture theatre?"
A talkative lecturer:
• "No, let me stop gibbering my mouth off without thinking about it
beforehand... and I've just shot myself in the foot"
1990
Starting off a course early in the year:
• "The important thing to remember about this course is that it doesn't
actually mean anything."
An energetic lecturer:
• "Note that one must always have his sleeves rolled up for discussing this
kind of thing."
Tautology-of-the-term prize:
• "If you start off with a 72 elements and take away half, you're left with the
other half"
CAMBRIDGE
1985
The Tautology prize goes to the lecturer who uttered the gem:
• "If we complicate things they get less simple."
This year's modesty award is given for a phrase spoken by a lecturer after a rather
difficult concept had just been introduced.
• "You may feel that this is a little unclear but in fact I am lecturing it
extremely well."
1986
From an algebra lecture:
• "This book fills a well needed gap in the literature."
And another encouraging book review:
• "This book is only for the serious enthusiast ; I haven't read it myself."
A perplexing quote from a theoretical chemist:
• "...but it might be a quasi-infinite set."
Now…What is a "quasi-infinite set?
An engineer actually gave an answer to the question of "quasi-infinite" sets:
• "It's one with more than ten elements."
And they wonder why buildings fall over... ??
In the middle of the course the lecturer offered this piece of careers advice:
• "If you haven't enjoyed the material in the last few lectures then a career
in chartered accountancy beckons."
A lecturer of Linear Systems found the following on his board when he arrived
one morning:
• "Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Greens' functions are boring
And so are Fourier transforms. "
1987
From a supervisor :
• "Any theorem in Analysis can be fitted onto an arbitrarily small piece of
paper if you are sufficiently obscure."
No matter how simple a course is there will always be occasions when a certain
amount of arithmetic is called for:
• "I just want you to have a brief boggle at the belly-busting complexity of
evaluating this."
From statistics:
• "I too would like to know what a statistician actually does."
• "We're not doing mathematics; this is statistics."
• "You could define the subspace topology this way, if you were
sufficiently malicious."
• "You mustn't be too rigid when doing Fluid mechanics."
This year the Computer Scientists seem to be in the running for the Honesty
Award:
• "I'm not going to get anything more useful done in this lecture, so I might
as well talk."
later followed by ...
"Well there you are, one more lecture with no useful content."
And from various research seminars in the King's College Research Centre:
• "I'm sure it's right whether it's valid or not."
• "...the non-uniqueness is exponentially small."
• "I'm not going to say exactly what I mean because I'm not absolutely
certain myself."
• "It's dangerous to name your children until you know how many you are
going to have."
• "You don't want to prove theorems that are false."
• "If you play around with your fingers for a while, you'll see that's true."
From a first year chemistry lecture… some personal problems of the lecturer:
• "Before I started this morning's lecture I was going to tell you about my
divorce… but on reflection I thought I'd better tell it to my wife first."
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