Galef on the Smartass Curve
Julia Galef, writing at the Measure of Doubt blog, in Math education: you’re doing it wrong, tells a story about her friend J:
On the entrance exam for his honors math class, several of the problems asked you to fill in the next number in the sequence, such as: 2, 4, 8, 16, _?_. Obviously, whoever wrote the exam wanted you to complete that sequence with “32,” because the pattern they’re thinking of is powers of 2. For n = 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, the formula 2n = 2, 4, 8, 16, 32. But J didn’t write “32.” He wrote “π.”
Hilarity ensues. As a former smartass math geek, I enjoyed the story.
May 16th, 2011 at 6:20 pm
http://xkcd.com/899/