How do you know you pissed off a Mathematician?

Note the Memo:

I don't know if this was real, but a friend forwarded it to me and I love it ~

Comments

[Jenny, Bloggess]

"What now, bitches" = awesomeness.

[mari@HP]

ROFL ~ *now* I see why Nessa loves you! BTW, I said it was funny, not accurate. But, the $0.002 makes it an even better story ~ maybe that's all he owed and they were nickel and dimeing him. Thanks for the basic algebra lesson ~ your schoolin' is paying off grasshopper!

[HispanicPundit]

This doesn't make sense at all. The translator does not know even basic math. There are two mistakes here, the first an innocent one, the second an elementary one. I'll explain.

The innocent mistake: if you look closely at the equation, it does not say e^2pi...it says e^ipi...*i*, being the critical letter. Plotting this on the unit circle, e^ipi gives you -1, not the long and complicated number e^2pi gives you.

The elementary mistake: 1/x^n, with a positive x raised to any positive power, especially infinity, CAN NEVER EVER, give you a number greater than 1. This is not unique to 2 or the exponent, but really ANY number that grows, when placed in the denominator, makes the whole thing SHRINK. So the most you can get is the numerator itself...because anything else, just makes it shrink MORE. This isn't calculus, this is basic algebra....just divide ANY number by a larger and larger number and see what happens...in other words, 1/2^n....with an upper limit of infinity...approaches 1.

So the check, in the end, is made out to zero (or, to be more precise, $0.002) dollars (making the hole thing funny - shit, send me a check for $500+ and I don't care how you write it)....not what the translator made it out to be.

[la rebelde]

hilarious!