Just Curious

More in-jokes

Here's one from Professor Murray Gerstenhaber, an algebraist who has been teaching at Penn for more than half a century.

You see, Penn has a relatively small math department, when compared to the University of Illinois, NYU or MIT. In order to have a truly strong math department, you need to supersize it first, so one day Prof. Gerstenhaber remarked,

If you take the intersection of the knowledge of all professors in our department, you get a null set; and if you take their union, the resultant set doesn't cover everything in modern math.

I used to tell my non-math friends about this, and they look confused. So I guess it qualifies as an in-joke.

posted by James Chang @ 6:16 PM