A Set
of
Mathematical
Equivoques
Ken Suman [email protected]
last updated on 1/7/2007
A
9 12 Abelian – 10 or 10 depending on whether you studied math or maths at school
Abscissa – a person who is self absorbed with their abs
Absolute Geometry – geometry that doesn’t play fair
Absolute Value – nonnegotiable price
Absorbing State – “You can check in any time you like, but you can never leave.”
Abundant Number – a lot
Acceptance Sampling – launching a trial balloon
Acousmatic – someone who is quick to point fingers
Adding Machine – a good summer
Additive Identity – alias
Adèle Group – the Astaire’s
Adenine – nucleotide that tells us how to go from 1 to 10
Adiabatic Law – always monitor your glucose level
Affine Variety – what a good store carries
Agonic – someone who lives in the past
Airport Problem – when you lose your in flight internet connection
Page 1 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
Alethic – stout
Alexander Polynomial – Iksander, Richard Burton, Colin Farrell, but apparently not Leonardo DiCaprio
ALGOL – what Julius Caesar divided into three parts
Aliorelative – onion
Aliter – a little more than a quart
Aliquot – “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee”
Allegory – Tipper’s husband when in Rome
Almost Surely – Shirley
Almost Everywhere – where kudzu grows
Alternating Group – Animagi
Alternation – Vatican City
Amenable Group – The Beatles
Amicable Pair – good friends
Amphibology – switch pitching
Analemma Curve – slant eight
Anallagmatic – Wrangler blue jeans
Analysis – denouement
Analysis of Variance – psychotherapy
Analytic Geometry – creole
Page 2 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
Annealing – genuflecting
Ansatz – A ‘Convenient’ Truth
Annihilator – “weapon of math destruction”
Annulus – what the unhappy couple asked the priest to do
Anticlastic – indivisible
Anticomplement – a disparaging word
Antinomy – what’s added to textiles to make them flame retardant (and carcinogenic?)
Antipode – an acrobat who juggles with their feet
Antiset – flavoring for those delicious Italian cookies
Antitone – ‘ill conditioned’ a-Partite Graph – government corruption in South Africa between 1948 and 1994
Apeiron – what Oprah did on The Late Show
Apex – 16 gallons
Apothem – what the bluetick pup treed
Apotome – The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe , 17 volumes, James Harrison, editor
Arbelos – where the pirate said the supplies were
Arcuate – without error
Arithmetic Geometry – Arithmetic on the Frontier
Page 3 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
Arrow of Time – an anachronism
Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem – what goes up must come down (assuming we ignore the potential effect of dark energy and trees)
Astroid – a tag for Elroy’s dog
Asymptote – how the farmer got his lame donkey home
Automorphic Form – hardtop convertible
Autoregression – PT Cruiser
Autos Epha – carpeter (carpetlayer)
Average – to bid farewell to the anger within
Axiom of Choice – The Importance of Being ‘Ernst’
Axis – sacks
B
Back Substitution – artificial disk replacement
Baire Category – ursine breed
Baire Space – ‘polar plot’
Ballot Problem – rigged election
Bandit Problems – when DoD money dries up for consulting inside the beltway
Barber’s Paradox – stylist’s knot
Page 4 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
Basel Problem – skin cancer
Basin of Attraction – the bathroom sink
Bayes’ Rule – wash the tub after each use
Beat the Dealer – Military Commissions Act provision for getting information out of Afghan opium traffickers
Bell Numbers – Cambridge Surprise Major , Little Bob Minor , Grandsire Triples , …
Bematist Goal – pari passu
In the time of Alexander the Great (356 BC – 323 BC) surveyors were trained in the skill of maintaining a fixed length pace, a bema ( βήµα ), over long distances. The bema was the distance between successive steps and was roughly two and a half feet. These human pedometers were called bematists and were able to stay within 1/100 of a bema with each step!
It is a persistent legend that Eratosthenes (276 BC – 194 BC) hired bematists to measure the distance from Alexandria to Syene as part of his famous effort to determine the size of the Earth. This story is beautifully told in the children’s book The Librarian Who Measured the Earth by Kathryn Lasky and is definitely worth reading by “kids” of all ages.
The Romans, in contrast to the Greeks, defined a pace (Latin passus ) as the distance that would bring a land surveyor (Latin agrimensore ) back to the same foot ( i.e. roughly five feet). Pari is Latin for “equal” and thus the phrase pari passu translates literally from the Latin as “equal pace”.
Putting this together, we have that the goal of a bematist (Greek) is to maintain an equal pace , which is the literal translation of the (Latin) phrase pari passu .
Pari passu is now used as a legal phrase with the general meaning of “on equal footing”. The phrase is also used in finance with the meaning “at the same rate”.
e.g. All creditors will be treated pari passu . Incomes for middle class and wealthy families were not increasing pari passu .
The equating of these Greek and Latin phrases apparently has no historical basis. But that is okay as there is a word for such invented linguistic
Page 5 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
miscegenations – it’s called macaronic .
And as any Italian restaurateur will tell you, the best way to top off a meal of macaroni like this is with a slice of pari passu , that delicious Italian dessert made with mascarpone cheese. But then that would be a malapropism and that’s another story altogether. Fortunately, linguists will forgive all if you say it with a big enough smile.
Benford’s Law – “One is the likeliest number that you’ll ever know. Two is not as likely as one, but it’s the likeliest number since the number one.”
Bias – the two words parents hear most on the cereal aisle
Bicorn – an option at the Merc
Bicursal – the ability to swear in two languages
Big-Endian, Little-Endian – Much Ado About Nothing
Big M Method – product bundling
Big O Notation – Oscar Robertson’s number
Bing Sling – a highball with a cherry
Binit – when you’ve had your turn in tag
Biplot – selecting a retirement location
Birthday Problem – old age
Block Scheduling – filibuster
BLUE – bummed
Bonnet Net – snood
Borda Count – 2(A− I + 1) when in Boston
Page 6 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
Boundary Condition – terminal case
Braneworld – “There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man.”
Brownian Motion – when a Girl Scout moves to recess
Butterfly Effect – Because a Little Bug Went Ka-choo!
Butterfly Effect – Psyched
C
Calculemus – Machiavellian motto
Calculus – the Flintstone’s daughter
Canard Solution – Duck Soup
Canonical Analysis – weapons inspection
Cantor Dust – what a horse kicks up
Cantor’s Middle Third Set – second of an hazan’s three part performance
Cardinal Characteristic – bright red cassock and zucchetto
Carnap Rule – never wake a baby who has fallen asleep in a car seat
Casting Out Nines – pitching your niblicks
Catenary – without even a hint of malice or spite
Catenoid – what you get if you grab a tiger by the tail
Page 7 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
Cattle Problem – BSE
Centroids – Emperor Palpatine’s (a.k.a. Darth Sidious) strategy for invading Naboo
Ceteris Paribus – Elsie the Cow
Cheney’s Card Trick – WHIG
Chudnovsky Brothers – piquant
Church’s Thesis – God exists
Cissoid – an impolite way to describe your elder sister
Clinure – the two words kids hear most re their room
Cliques – Ska Geeks, Metalheads, Goths, Punks, …
Closed Function – a private party
Clustering Illusion – apophenia
Cochain – what Joe Paterno is known for
Cofactor – someone faking a cold
Cofinal – what you have when students collude on the end of term exam
Collatz Problem – when pages of your exam are out of order
Column Space – stoa
Combinatorics on Words – magnetic poetry
Common Knowledge – heard throughout the dining hall
Commutative Group – carpoolers
Page 8 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
Commutator – a spud-nik
Complement of a Set – best wishes to the newlyweds
Complete Pivoting – an about-face
Completing the Square – The Princess Diaries
Complex Analysis – study connecting guilt, inferiority, god, persecution, martyrs and nice guys
Complex Numbers – Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 , Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2 , Liszt’s Transcendental Etude No. 5 , and Chopin’s Etude No. 1, Op.10 .
Complex Plane – the F-22A Raptor
Comprehensive Exam – day of reckoning
Conic Section – where Dilbert lives
Conjunction – The Joint
Construction Tools – Erector Set
Continued Fraction – an ongoing part
Contour Map – what tourists use at Alcatraz
Contrapositive – Oliver North’s point of view
Control Group – Agents 86 and 99, Chief, Larabee and Hymie
Cook’s Theorem – “the proof of the pudding is in the eating”
Coprimes – bop, hop, lop, mop, pop, sop, top, …
Corner Test – an autopsy
Page 9 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
Correlation Implies Causation – cum hoc , ergo propter hoc
Coset – Jean Valjean’s daughter
Cossic Art – pysanky
Countability of the Rationals – "Everyone is crazy except you and me … and sometimes I wonder about you."
Critical Path – Main Street
Critical Point – exigency
Cross Product – double cross
Crunode – Bordeaux
C-Space – an ocean
Curve of Constant Width – spotting everyone the same number of points
Cylinder – what the revenuer asked the bootlegger
D
Damped Sine – sine die
Data Mining – planting a nihilartikel
Data Snooping – what Sherlock Holmes does
Decanting Problems – what Socrates, Martin Luther, Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilei had
Decimal System – Powers of Ten
Page 10 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
Degenerate Locus – a real boor
Degree Sequence – Bachelor’s, Master’s, Ph.D.
Deleted Neighborhood – aftereffect of an urban renewal project
Demand Curve – what students often do
Dequeue – ice cream parlor
Deranged Permutations – ‘mental mathematics’
De Revolutionibus – the VW Splittie
Diagnostic – Pat Robinson’s war cry
Diagonally – where Harry Potter shops
Diameter – a vending machine that eats dimes
Didactic Numbers – Take It to the Limit (Eagles), Operator (Jim Croce), Circle (Harry Chapin), Revolution (Beatles)
Digital Computer – a Chisenbopper
Digital Root – toe hold
Digon – typical problem with board games
Directed Graph – organized crime
Disquisitiones – The Bee Gees, Donna Summer, KC and the Sunshine Band …
Divisible – when the gaming cube is in sight
Dixon’s Identity – Leslie McFarlane
Page 11 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
DNA Computers – ‘genetic algorithms’
Dot Product – husband
Double Blind – taking an eye for an eye
Double Blind – turning on your bright lights in retaliation
Double Dot – peridot
Double Edged Ruler – benevolent dictator
Double Negative Elimination – when it’s two strikes and you’re out
Doubling the Cube – what you do in backgammon to squeeze your opponent out
Dual Space – field of honor
Dunnett's Test – a quiz to see who has done their homework
Dyad – what TiVo lets you say to commercials
Dyscalculia – Why Johnny Can’t Add
E
Elementary Row Operation – feathering
Enqueue – Are You Being Served ?
Epistemic Justification – American Pie
Epols – run over the rise
Page 12 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
Equals – online qualifying exams
Equant – mathematical financier who works online
Error Correcting Code – the “you break it, you own it” rule
Escher’s Ascending and Descending – going Up the Down Staircase
Essential Supremum – theism
Euler – Jiffy Lube employee
Euler Criteria – every 3 months or 3000 miles
Euler Line – slippery slope
Eversion – online adaptation
Evil Twin Strategy – designing a spoof WiFi hot spot with the intent of intercepting sensitive data
Evolutionary Operation – phylogenetic systematics
Existence Theorem – cogito, ergo sum
Existential Quantifier – agnostic
Explement – what it takes to be The Compleat ‘Angle’
Extraction of Roots – pulling teeth
Extraneous Roots – outside sources
F
Page 13 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
Fair Division – proper fraction
Fair Game – open target
Faltings’ Theorem – it’s easier to find it than accept it
Farey Series – Tales of the Brothers Grimm
Fatigue Failure – when your army pants wear out
Feller Property – prostate gland
Ferrari's Method – give it at least a 6 liter, 12 cylinder, 540 horsepower engine
Fictitious Play – Springtime for Hitler
Field Axioms – ground rules
Field Extension – one way to make it a pitcher’s park
Field’s Medal – potassium
Field Theory – “If you build it, they will come.”
Field Theory – agronomy
Figurate Numbers – 8, 88, 888, …
Final State – New Jersey
Fisher’s Exact Test – a hanging scale
Fisher Information – depth finder
Fixed Point – what a pencil sharpener gives you
Flexagon – what happens when you get old
Page 14 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
Floor Function – to “give me a place to stand” ( pou sto )
Floor Function – to make sherry
Fluid Flow – a runny nose
Focal Cord – it vibrates to make sounds
Forcing – new suit bid by responder
Formalist Mathematics – The Great Game
Formally Real Field – Giant’s Stadium
FORTRAN – what the general did
Fourier Series – a line of shoes that comes in widths extra wide to extra narrow
Four Squares Theorem – four squares a day will soon make you round
Free Group – emancipated ones
Freshman’s Dream – a 4.0
Frieze Pattern – snowflake
Full Adder – Adderall
Functional Analysis – a checkup
Fundamental Group – supporting the APA
Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic – the great divide
Fuzzy Addition – dim sum
Page 15 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
G
Game of Life – Samsara
Game Theory – rules of play
Generated Field – A New Kind of Science
Genetic Algorithms – Mr. Holland’s (Magnum ) Opus
Genetic Algorithms – DNA computers
Geoboard – weltschmerz
Gibbs Sampling – Bee Gees : Number Ones
GIMPS – Great Internet Mathematical Pun Search
Gnomon – first rule at an all girls school
God’s Algorithm – stella octangula
Goldbach Conjecture – (Copper, Silver, Gold) maps to (Gödel, Escher, Bach)
Golden Ratio – karat
Goniometry – joint analysis
Goodness of Fit Test – trying on a new pair of shoes
Gradient – your mother’s aunt
Gradus Suavitatis – The Sound of Music
Grasshopper Sequence – 28 (B.A.), 30 (M.A.), 34 (Ph.D.), 83 (Commodore), 85 (Admiral)
Page 16 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
Gray Code – West Point regulations
Greatest Common Divisor – a wedge issue
Great Paradox – the Mayo Brothers
Grok Mathematics – “turn coffee into theorems”
Guthrie's Problem – fascism
H
Haar Function – to keep your head warm
Habeas Corpus – The Texan’s Detain Law Massacre
Hairy Ball Theorem – “If you’ve got a taste for terror, then take Carrie to the prom.”
Half-Open – ajar
Half Space – overtrick bonus (points above the line)
Half Space – en
Halting Problem – faulty brakes
Harmonic Number – a blues harp tune
Harmonic Series – lick
Heaviside Cover-Up Method – wearing loose fitting clothes
Hero’s Formula – rescue the damsel in distress, smile, wave
Page 17 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
Hexafoil – amulet
Higher Arithmetic – celestial reckoning
Higher Arithmetic Conference – summit
Hilary Term – 2008 – 2012 ?
Hippopede – hoof
Hitting Time – 16 or less
Homaloidal Space – Flatland
Homomorphism – reparative therapy (see Nonstandard Analysis)
Horner’s Method – sticking a thumb in
Horocycle – 12
Hotel Infinity – MGM Grand Las Vegas
I
ii – eye to eye
i× i – cross-eyed
2 i – ogle
5 i – eye for an eye
Ideal Class – “where everyone is above average”
Page 18 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
Ideal Point – mot juste
Idempotent – a powerful token
Ill Conditioned – ‘antitone’
Illegal Operation – medical malpractice
Ill-Posed Problem – hidden faces in a group photo
Imaginary Numbers – Fantasia Mathematica
Immanant – nomen ambiguum (re immanent, imminent, eminent and emanant)
Incircles – how we often run
Inclusion-Exclusion Principle – ACT/SAT scores
Incomplete Design – adumbration
Indeterminate Form – amorphous
Infinite Mean – Great Expectations
Inspection Paradox – it usually takes longer than it usually takes
Insphere – how too many people live
Integration by Parts – gradual desegregation
Integration by Substitution – forced busing
Into Mapping – a cartographer
Inverse Probability – Probability seems to remain An idea I’ve yet to attain. I was sure I played right
Page 19 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
In my poker tonight, But my fortune it went down the drain.
Inversion – dernier cri
Involution – contronym
Ising Problem – being a note behind and a step off-key
Iterated Series – reruns
J
Jordan Normal Form – just over 30 ppg
K
K2 – Austin Godwin
Kaprekar Number – Claudette Colbert (Ellie) shows off her leg
Kernel – Blotto’s rank
Kissing Number – count your buss-ings
Klein Bottle – a small carafe
Knapsack Problem – a sleeping bag that’s too small
Knot Curve – straight
Page 20 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
Knot Equivalence – difference
Know It All Number – 999 !
L
Lah Number – six in the solfa
L'Analyse des Infiniment Petits – nanotechnology
Language of Arithmetic – Adder’s Tongue
Latin Square – Cato the Elder
Lattice-Ordered Group – everyone at the table who wanted a salad
Law of Sines – stop, yield, and no passing
Law of the Excluded Middle – the U distribution
ℵ0 Law of Truly Large Numbers – 2 = ℵ1 is undecidable
Leading Digit – forefinger
Least Favorable Distribution – corridor of uncertainty
Least Favorable Prior – the most disliked person in the abbey
Least Squares – hippest
Left Censoring – aphesis
Liber Abaci – a showman with a silver candelabrum
Page 21 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
Lie Group – Army of Northern Virginia
Lim Sup – cannibal favorite on cold damp days
Littlewood’s Law – “then a miracle occurs” occurs
Local Min or Local Max – peripeteia
Loess – s
Logarithm – poetry
Logistic Curve – procurement snag
Logit – how to harvest a forest
Long Tail – megillah
Lorenz Curve – when your cheap apartment suddenly quits being cheap
Lune – Minnesota’s state bird
M
Mahler’s Number – a thousand (an orchestra of 250 and a chorus of 750)
Majorant – army ant
Majorize – bring up to the bigs
Maltitude – a large gathering at the shopping center
Markov Chains – used to mark off first downs
Page 22 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
Mathemagician – ruler of Digitopolis
Mathematical Maturity – musemathematics
Mathesis – “We may be coming to a new golden age of instrument making.”
Mathesis Universalis – Catholic reckoning
MathSciNet – The Paper Chase -r
Matric – Beltane ring and run
Measure Preserving Transformation – Measure for Measure
Mellin Transform – honeylope
Memoryless Property – amnesia
Mental Mathematics – ‘deranged permutations’
Meter – what Cary Grant hoped to do atop the Empire State Building
Method of Exhaustion – a form of torture, regardless …
Method of False Position – playing the devil’s advocate
Method of Washers – agitate, rinse and spin
Minorant – pet peeve
Minuends – Yehudi and his two sisters
Minus Five – Paul Desmond standard
Misomaths – adenoids
Mod 3 – Pete, Linc and Julie
Page 23 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
Modulus – when you are not as fashionable
Monster-Barring – what a night light is for
Monster Group – Titans
Monty Hall Problem – “To switch , or not to switch : that is the question:”
Moore Space – what everybody wants in their garage
Music of the Spheres – tinnitus
Mutatis Mutandis – put on a fresh diaper
N
Nadir – a spoiler
Napoleon’s Problem – Waterloo
Natural Numbers – 7-11
Negatively Oriented – critical
Neusis Construction – when your mom is pregnant with a baby girl
Neutral Geometer – The No-Sided Professor
Nilpotent – weak
Nine Point Circle – SCOTUS at a round-table
Nodated – stag
Page 24 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
Nonnegative – Antigone
Non-Orientable n - Manifold – Lost n -Space
Nonstandard Analysis – method outside of the APA Practice Guidelines
Nontransitive – not admitting a theodolite
Nowhere Dense – polymath
Nowhere Differentiable – identical
Null Space – vacuum
Number Sense – anesthesia
O
Obelisk – Asterix’s comic sidekick
Oblate – recently
Occupancy Problem – Iraq
Ogive – how one requests a home on the range
Oloid – Rolie Polie Olie
One-Tailed – Harper Lee, Margaret Mitchell and Emily Bronte
One-to-One Correspondence – tête-à-tête
Open and Shut the Doors Problem – Jim Morrison’s addictions
Page 25 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
Operations Research – surgical trials
Operator – someone who wouldn’t enjoy Fermat’s Last Tango
Ordered Group – plebes
Order of Operations – anesthetize before cutting
Order Statistics – accounts payable records
Organon – popular way to Toccata and Fugue in D Minor listen
Outlier – someone who gets a tan the old fashioned way
Overdamped – soggy
Ovoid – to eschew
P
Painlevé Equation – take two aspirin and get some rest
Pangeometry – what The Elements made Sylvester do
Paradigms – 20 cents
Parity Error – as in commited, writen, and commitee
Partial Fraction – a tiff
Partial Order – appetizers
Partial Summation – half adder
Page 26 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
Partition into Distinct Parts – tracking (ability grouping)
Partition into Odd Parts – gerrymander
Pedal Point – At the very moment Johann Sebastian Bach started his command performance of Toccata in F Major (BWV 540) for his benefactor Prince Leopold, Bach’s youngest son, (P.D.Q. Bach, 21 st of his 20 children) sat on a bass pedal of the organ. J.S. Bach had no choice but to play on as if this sustained bass pedal note was intentional. It took 54 bars but Bach’s second wife, Anna Magdalena, was eventually able to extract P.D.Q. from that bass pedal. This incident, led musicologist Peter Schickele to describe P.D.Q. Bach as “the worst musician ever to have trod organ pedals.”
Perfect Field – Elysian
Perfect Field – Field of Dreams
Perigees – a straight angle (two right turns)
Perigees – Leslie Caron
Perimeter – The Outer Limits
Permutation – counter counter proposal
Philo’s Line – “The triple pillar of the world transform'd into a strumpet's fool: behold and see.”
Phyllotaxis – what the “Sons of Liberty” had had
Picard’s Method – ask Data
Pick’s Rule – you cut, I pick
Pillow Problems – stiff necks
Plateau’s Law – good employees within an organization will enthusiastically advance to the highest level open to them but will then ultimately retire on the job
Page 27 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
Playfair’s Axiom – the fundamental rule of the playground
Poisson Process – trawling
Polar Axis – Alaskan adzes
Polar Coordinate – a bare spot
Polar Plot – ‘Baire space’
Polya Process – census
Polygon – bird flu
Polykay – KKK
Polytope – shiver of sharks
Pons Asinorum – bridge to a clean and dry county
Porism – one “who works with a negligent hand”
Positive – Beyond the Zero
Positively Skewed – definitely in big trouble
Posterior Bayes Risk – the potential for hurting your backside in the tub
Pothenot Problem – when the next rest area is another hundred miles
Power of a Point – they stymie opponents when made in debates or backgammon
Power Tower – utility pole
P Problem – UTI
Prime – a run of six made points
Page 28 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
Prime Elements – B, N, K, V, I and others
Prime Factors – most important reasons
Prime Ring – the Mob
Principal Ideal Domain – Garden of Eden
Principia – Fortinbras
Prisoner’s Dilemma – orange dye is both necessary and sufficient for big- house fashion
Prisoner’s Problem – “Who is Number 1?”
Probabilistic Method – cleromancy
Probit Analysis – an ultrasound
Problem of Points – when made too often you are left without a pencil or friends
Problem of the Nile – you’re only fooling yourself
Products – University of Oregon fans
Proof Bullet Proof – a proof that cannot be easily shot down Burden of Proof – dementia Sound Proof – a proof that holds up against even the loudest critic Reproof – when your professor scoffs at your proof and tells you to redo it Proofreader – a math professor Goof Proof – when you make a wrong turn in your proof Overproof – Q.E.D.
Proper Fraction – fair division
Prophecy – what students are not likely to be able to do in a large lecture section
Proposition – one side of a debate
Page 29 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
Prosecutor's Fallacy – going up against Perry Mason
Prosthaphaeresis – ante -logarithms
Protractor – a staller
Public-Key Cryptology – Tukey Model
Publish or Perish – The Paper Chase
Punnett Square – someone who spends their day thinking up puns
Pure Mathematics – Math You Can't Use
Pythagoras – The Wizard of ‘Om’
Pythagorean – vegetarian
Q
Quadrant – diatribe in the atrium
Quadrature – test driving an Audi with full-time all-wheel drive
Quincunx – a pair of skunks
Quine – phoenix
R
Raabe’s Criterion – foaming at the mouth
Page 30 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
Radical Center – faculty lounge
Radon Measure – picocuries per liter
Ramsey Theory – he is atoning for indicting Dr. Spock
Randomized Block Design – your typical Lego creation
Randomized Responses – fibs
Rational Root – a sound foundation
Rattleback – Spinal Tap
Raw Score – a method of tenderizing meat
Reciprocity Law – the Golden Rule
Recursive Relation – Aunt Marge casting invectives again
Reduced Echelon – demoted
Reduction Formula – a diet plan
Relative Error – when your in-laws stay too long
Relaxation Method – yoga
Renewal Process – renaissance
Renorming Test Scores – ‘retrograde analysis’
Repeated Measures – Da Capo
Repeated Sum – doubleplus
Repetend – when another goldfish jumps out of the tank
Page 31 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
Repunit – a recycled pun
Restricted Compositions – canons
Retrograde Analysis – ‘renorming test scores’
Retrograde Motion – student’s request to have their exam rescored
Reverse Hex – exorcise
Reverse Mathematics – opsimath
Reversion to the Mean – getting angry again
Rhumb Line – what sailors form while awaiting their tot
Right Annihilator – Al Franken
Right Censoring – apocope
Ring Theory – Tom Bombadil is a Maia
River Crossing Problem – seasickness
Robbins Equation – a worm in the beak is worth two in the ground
Roman Numerals – Summa Theologiae
Roman Numerals – restoration of the Sistine Chapel
Roots of Unity – foundation for peace
RSA Numbers – tally marks on the Ochre Stone
Rule of Three – “Then, shalt thou count to three. No more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three.”
Page 32 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
Runs Test – 100-meter dash
S
Saltus – what French fries scream
Scalar – disarray
Schubert Cycle – Die schöne Müllerin
Scottish Book – bistromathics
Seasonal Time Series – ostinato
Secants – what a ship does to get turned around
Secants – what Ann Coulter does
Secretary’s Problem – carpal tunnel syndrome
Self Complementary – tooting your own horn
Self Dual – beating yourself up
Self Similarity – synecdoche
Semigroup – convoy
Semiprime – the Prime Mover
Series Expansion – when the LCS went to 7 games
Set – awkward moment after being put down but before you take a hike
Page 33 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
Shadow Reckoning – ‘umbral calculus’
Shift Operator – plant supervisor working graveyard
Signum – what you do with checks
Simple Graph – petty bribery
Simple Hypothesis – A Modest Proposal
Simplex – an oxymoron describing anything which is at once simple and complex. For example, love, truth and carbohydrates.
Simpson’s Paradox – Maggie shot Mr. Burns
Singularity – 2045 A.D.
Singular Value – Sudoku
Sinh – easily done
Sinical – believing the worst
Slide Rule – no budging
Slope Field – hillside farm
Soma Cube – felicific calculus
Space Filling Curve – horror vacui
Spira Mirabilis – Annu’s sister
Square the Lune – a Debussy favorite
Squaring the Circle – truing the wheel
Squeeze Rule – from the bottom up
Page 34 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
Standard Deviant – your typical reprobate
Standard Error – common mistake
Standard Position – the party line
Static Equilibrium – peacetime
Stepwise Analysis – podiatric research
Strange Attractor – Call of the Wild
Strange Attractor – Where the Wild Things Are
String Theory – Cordon rule
Subbasis – katabasis
Subcover – lettuce and tomatoes
Subset – a pair of Seawolfs
Subtracted – nonplussed
Subtracting – dropping sonobouys
Sumset – gloaming
Superposition – “in the catbird seat”
Superposition – building manager
Supremum Limit – omnipotence paradox
Surreal Numbers: How Two Ex-Students Turned on to Pure Mathematics and Found Total Happiness – Donald in Mathmagic Land
Symmetry – to climb a tree without branches
Page 35 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
Syntheme – story line of the Old Testament
Synthetic Division – an invented issue
T
Tac Tix – a tractrix to the complete non-rhotic
Tail Event – wagging
Tautochrone – what Hansel and Gretel did with a good lesson
Taylor’s Series – seamster’s line
Teacher’s Pets – students with Beatitudes (be-prepared, be-attentitive, and be-curious)
Teaching Rules ! -
1. Do no harm . (Children are born with sympathy for learning – apathy and antipathy take training.)
2. Leave the world a better place . (Teach the students you have to become the ones you were hoping for.)
3. Inspire courage . (Teach students to be as confident in their abilities and convictions as you are in yours.)
4. Be patient and reward endurance . (Education is a race where the winners are those who never finish.)
5. Make connections . (No student ever went blind by staring at the bigger picture for too long.)
6. Draw distinctions . (An appreciation for differences never started a war.)
7. Nurture criticism . (Good vision involves seeing what isn’t as well as what is.)
Page 36 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
8. Aim high . (The goal is to build extraordinary people, not just extraordinary students.)
9. Work yourself out of job . (Teach students how to teach themselves.)
10. Leave them smiling . (The student who has found the way to enjoy learning will never be lost.)
Tensor – more nervous
Terminating Renewal Process – doublespeak for getting canned
The Analyst : A Discourse Addressed to an Infidel Mathematician – The Calculus Affair (The Adventures of Tintin)
The French Mathematician – A Series of Unfortunate Events
Theorema Egregium – rank theorem
Theory of Polls – The Parrot’s Theorem
Thou shall have but three regular tilings of the plane – Torah
Three – Lawrence Welk count-off
Three Body Problem – diagramming all forces acting on a given rigid object
Topologically Distinct – holier than thou
Total Positivity – Pollyanna
Totative – not too heavy to carry
Transcendental Number – 10
Transfinite Numbers – “to infinity and beyond”
Page 37 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
Transitive Group – nomads
Translation Operator – Oulipo +N algorithm
Translation Operator – Babel fish
Traveling Salesman Problem – Willy Loman complex
Triangle Inequality – when three’s a crowd
Truel – Lionel’s honest brother
Truth Table – to put off honesty for a later date
Turing Machine – a bike with many gears
Twin Paradox – Sylvester and Cayley
Twin Primes – Harman Killebrew, Tony Oliva, Rod Carew, Kirby Puckett and Kent Hrbek
Two-Tailed – bicaudal
U
Umbral Calculus – ‘shadow reckoning’
Unary – stuffy
Unate – disgorge
Unbounded – From Here to Eternity
Undecidable – aporetic
Page 38 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
Unitary Fraction – A Separate Peace
Universal Mathematician – Thoth
Urn Problem – The Leaky Cauldron
V
Versed Cosine – Dudley to Harry Potter
Versed Sine – initial indicator
Vicenary – Utopian
Vulgar Fraction – a nasty break-up
W
Waring’s Problem – when your pants quit fitting
Wavelet – a little vague
Well Ordered – not “putting Descartes before the horse”
Wetware – raincoat
Page 39 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
WFF ‘N PROOF – A fantastic method of proof combining ‘scratch and sniff’ with ‘proof without words’ patented by the research team of Arlo Lipof, a mathematician at the Univ. of Western Ontario, George P. Burdell, an expert in bioinformatics at Georgia Tech, and Dr. Larry Kyle, founder of Genway, ‘the supermarket for genetically engineered foods’. Together they formed the company Maieutica .
The strong connection between smells and memory is at the heart of the company’s approach. Their breakthrough was in mapping specific smells to specific memory triggers. Lipof, who is of Greek heritage, believes like Socrates that the human brain innately possesses the building blocks of all mathematical knowledge and that these blocks lie in wait for the right trigger to be expressed. This idea is called maieutics , which roughly translates from the Greek as ‘intellectual midwifery’ and is one of four parts of the socratic method. For Socrates the memory trigger was a series of guided questions. At Maieutica , the memory trigger is a series of carefully sequenced smells determined by their newly discovered mapping.
Lipof contacted Burdell with some of his ideas in 2002. At that time Burdell was wrapping up his part in the 13-year Human Genome Project (HGP) and was shopping for his next big project. Burdell was initially skeptically, but he knew of Lipof’s reputation for doing what others thought impossible. (In the late 1980’s Lipof led a South American team, where many fortunes were secured, in what is thought to be the first and only practical application of the Banach-Tarski paradox. A brief sketch about this highly successful business venture appeared in the April 1989 issue of Scientific American.)
Lipof then brought Kyle onto the team. Kyle, who is a regular guest on MPR (Minn. Public Radio), is regarded by his peers as a creative genius with a flair for the unusual. Kyle was able to genetically engineer smells based on recent advances in olfaction that have occurred as a direct result of the Human Genome Project. Dilution to threshold ratios (parts of clean air to scented air) as sensitive as 70,000 to 1 were considered.
Finally Lipof had a group of graduate students translate Euclid’s Elements into formal proofs , a low level mathematical language that can be likened to machine code in computer science.
It was a four year process to map each step of each formal proof to a specific smell at a precise dilution to threshold ratio. But with this olfactory mapping Maieutica has the code for unlocking geometry for the next generation of students who would rather smell than study.
Whetstone of Witte – where to sharpen your humor
Page 40 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]
XYZ
Yule Process – shop till you drop
ZFC Axioms – Foundation Series
Page 41 A Set of Mathematical Equivoques Ken Suman, [email protected]