Amusing Maths Lecturer Quotes!

This section is just the quotes from Part II lecturers, in my third year.

NB: I am not making fun of these lecturers in any way! I publicise these quotes in order to show how cool my various lecturers are. I'm a big fan of all of the men quoted here!  In fact, there usually tends to be a positive correlation between the number of amusing quotes a lecturer makes, and the general quality of their lecturing and how well we learn.  So cease thy paranoia, o lecturers!
 

Maths Part II
Prof Grojnowski	(Representation Theory, Lent 2000)
Favourite quotes: "How are we going to prove this: Well it's obvious. We're going to follow our nose - er, my nose, chalk-covered though it may be" "If you were thinking this early in the morning, you'd be throwing chalk at me for giving you such a boring example... but I'm the one with the chalk" "At this point it would be a good idea to revise what we've learnt... ''We have learnt that it is very hard to get up this early in the morning''..." "It's not easy being ludicrous... Some are born to it, others aspire to it, and others don't have a hope in hell!"
Dr Thomason	(Combinatorics, Lent 2000)
"Theorem 3: Every non-trivial tree has at least 2 leaves"  "You call the thing a matroid - sounds like something you should be rubbing cream on, to me, but never mind"  "Pull somebody out of the party and look at them: they've got five coloured strings coming out of them"  "Right. Somebody has to write this down, and I think it's me"
Prof Coates	(Algebraic Curves, Lent 2000)
"If you meet an elliptic curve on the street and I ask you to add two points on it... "
Dr Forster	(Logic, Computation and Set Theory, Mich. '99)
[arriving shortly]

DR GROJNOWSKI (Representation Theory, Lent 2000)

Mathematician, or what?	Morning Glory	Brainpower
Riemann surfaces, algebraic curves... what'd you call them?...Donuts with many holes!	I get silly when I get woken up too early	Ignore this if it doesn't make complete sense
What does G do? - it permutes these bunnies around	Oh dear. Never wear black when teaching...	"Hint - just think". Yeah - thinking is good
I'm getting so old, dammit, that I can't remember not knowing this! It's a weird feeling...	This is an early-in-the-morning exercise, meaning we already know the answer	Thinking is good but I'm also meant to do a lot of the thinking for you
Do some parts of groups just die, do they just get knocked off never to be seen again?  The answer is no - isn't that reassuring!	If you were thinking this early in the morning, you'd be throwing chalk at me for giving you such a boring example... but I'm the one with the chalk	That makes that obvious, doesn't it? - Just stare at it for a while
This lecture has been brought to you by Functions on Something	If you're as out of it as I am most minutes of the week...	I'll give you enough examples in the next 20 seconds that you won't have to stare at it, you'll pick it up by osmosis!
Doesn't this kind of thing make you think that mathematicians are so weird!?	[At 9:15] On the one hand, this is obvious to most of us, right? ...On the other hand, it's about 20 minutes after most of us got up...	This idea looks pretty simple. And is pretty simple. But I still don't understand it
Notation is baaad. But bad notation is worse!	At this point it would be a good idea to revise what we've learnt... "We have learnt that it is very hard to get up this early in the morning"...	Have I said something stupid? No? Just incomprehensible
The nice thing about being a mathematician is that you can be paranoid and a conspiracy theorist. You know if you're a paranoid conspiracy theorist, you believe that everything coheres and everything fits together? Well in maths, it all really does fit together!	I'm normal today! This is me as I usually am! Previously you've had a sleep-deprived me, but this is the normal me!	Shall I explain why these are obviously equal?
		If it isn't obvious, it's confusing
How are we going to prove this: Well it's obvious. We're going to follow our nose - er, my nose, chalk-covered though it may be "Proof: Follow my nose"...	I'd forgotten the thing about not wearing black while teaching... I've been sparing myself my black jeans for weeks for this very reason, chalk marks and things but I forgot about the [brushes arms in distaste]... Anyway...	No thinking is required here... but thinking is a good thing, so maybe we'll do a bit of thinking about it in a minute and we'll realise it's obvious
If you're doing research, trying to understand the world, and something like this comes up, what do you do? Other than run away screaming...	It's clear that, um... What is it clear that? It's clear that I should start again on this next lecture...	What does that say? Well, let's stare at that for a moment... In fact, let's stare at it for the next five minutes
Exercise: Check that I haven't lied to you	[on a lovely snow-covered morning] At the moment to me "fields" are fields covered in snow, not fields as algebraic objects	An example, just to remind me if no-one else
Do you feel that you can now go to cocktail parties and when you tell people you study how symmetries occur in nature, though they look at you strangely they'll... no, they'll just look at you strangely...	I don't know what I was doing last night! -[students snigger; responds with] No, no, nothing interesting!	This should confuse you for about 1/10 of a second, and then you should go "Uh, of course". But somehow you need the 1/10 of a second, just to see there's a point
Cocktail parties? Do people still do those any more? No, they go clubbing! But you can't talk to people when you're out clubbing...	Everyone's looking very blank. Do I have to do all the work?	I'm just teaching you to differentiate [taught in secondary school] without using the words. But I think you know how to differentiate.
Mathematics has room for lots of weirdos in it	There is no way they're getting me to teach at 9am next year
I think this is a natural question if you're weird... maybe even if you're not	[His highest compliment:] Lie algebras you can do in the morning
Before you try to analyze how a group acts in nature, it's kinda polite to meet the group first
I'm sparing you from the working because 2x2 matrix computations are no fun for anyone... but you can't spare yourself from them
I'm being serious. There's a point to this. But I see why it seems ludicrous.
Lecture style	The negative side	So that's how Americans do math...
"Example 5" - are there 5 examples? "Yet another example"	"Proof is an exercise" - which means that I'm not going to use it and you're not going to use it	The math of our century. - Er - I mean - the century we're still really part of - or something
The group of 2 elements acts on me. Well it doesn't really act on me, it acts on my silly little picture...	The first 2 million 12 thousand and 3 times you do this, you get the order wrong	I don't want you to start thinking you have to visualise a 4-dimensional space, cause that would just be silly
Isn't it boring?  I just repeat things.  Isn't it boring?  I just repeat things.	If you were that much of an optimist, you'd be wrong. But if you were a slightly more relaxed optimist...	a a a a. - No! It's a a - a a ...
And anyway, as I seem to enjoy repeating myself - and anyway, as I seem to enjoy... no, done that one already	The answer is called Frobenius reciprocity. [apologetically] Hey, it's just a name!	This is what I'm saying when I say the character table is square - but it's squarer than that! ...But it's not really really square.
Doing the problem sheet is more important than listening to me. It's very nice if you want to listen to me...	My fault, bad me...	I know this is vague, but it's reelly important!
You're supposed to start grinning at this stage! Shame on those of you who aren't grinning!	It's a stupid thing to do. Why is it a stupid thing to do? Well, it just is, isn't it	It doesn't have a hope in hell of being irreducible!
student: Is that a 9 or a 1?   - dr groj: It's a 4!	It has a corollary which is even stupider	It makes sense to check that it makes sense
Ah! So you have seen it before, but nobody knew what I was talking about!	The conclusion is: this is garbage!	It's not easy being ludicrous... Some are born to it, others aspire to it, and others don't have a hope in hell!
If you don't know this, you're bad! I did teach you this! Bad bad bad...	This letter is a Gothic G. It's one of these fascist G's that are marching through the years...	In general addition is not commutative, especially before breakfast!
It's kinda obvious... by which I mean it's a fair summary of all we learnt	This has the property that if we get to the top and hit it, you fall off the edge and die, right? You get zero. This is a good thing. So we need a lemma, um, a lemma to say this is a good thing to have...	G is a compact group if it's also compact
When's our next lecture? Thursday? Thankyou. So today must be Tuesday.	Shame on whoever taught it to you - I hope it wasn't me!	I can add, right? And let's ignore the fact that I can't subtract
Continuous - which I can't spell which is why I'm abbreviating it to "cts"		I'm just stating the obvious, in more ways than I care to mention
Am I weirder than normal today? From the way you guys are laughing... I feel normal...		We prove this just by proving it!
If you attend a course on Lie algebras and they don't teach you how to solve this by drawing pictures, then throw chalk at them!	Cambridge	The course just changes completely in flavour, doesn't it? It goes psshhhhhhh... bler!
Tell them it's by this person called Kashiwara, and it's in a paper called... Structures of Crystals? Or something? And then they'll throw chalk back at you!	It's a wonderful book, but it's so Cambridge - it's so weird!	It's faster to compute another example and then try to figure out what the hell's going on
And now I want to burble for 3 seconds: "Why the hell do you do this?" Oh, yes, that was a good burble...	It's got some strange features, this place [Cambridge], but that's one of the good bits, right!?

DR THOMASON (Combinatorics, Lent 2000)

All sets are finite. Well actually that's a lie...

The book "Graph theory": There's an updated version, called "Modern graph theory". It's not any more modern, but it covers twice the material for half the price, so that seems fairly good value

Theorem 3: Every non-trivial tree has at least 2 leaves

Let's think about a tree for a moment

What we have to do is write that down without waving our hands

You call the thing a matroid - sounds like something you should be rubbing cream on, to me, but never mind

There is a proof - and it was discovered by a man named Prüfer!

What were we doing last time? We were matching men with women, as I recall

Introduce d gregarious women, knowing all the men... "gregarious" is perhaps the wrong word, but I'll let you insert your own adjective

Then remove the d men. Some of the women may have been married to these men, so they... well, I was going to say "lose out", but whether this would be a loss or not is unclear

Replace each woman by d clones of herself.

This is H dashed in that potato, I'm sorry

No-one realised it was there until many years later people went back and found it

But now we start fooling about above the waist. [Waist of the n-cube, that is...]

Even though the proof we have is entirely trivial, this proof is even more trivial...

How do you make your shadow as small as possible, is what we're interested in

We may assume this component is the smallest. - [thoughtfully] Oh! May we? - Look, there's 2 minutes left so we're going to have to assume this component is the smallest...

Among these 6 friends there are either 3 mutual friends or 3 mutual enemies, which would be more likely in parties that I go to...

Imagine everybody's attached to everybody else by a piece of coloured string

Pull somebody out of the party and look at them: they've got five coloured strings coming out of them

What number shall I give this theorem? [turns to audience] [student calls out "29!"] Right. Theorem 29, then...

I don't want to suggest Ramsey was a bit dim - on the contrary, he was a Cambridge undergrad... [audience laugh] Well, OK, that doesn't prove anything as you well know...

There was a little competition to prove this between these two [mathematicians]: they were trying to impress a girl at the time

It says something about Hungary, I guess, that one can impress women by proving theorems

[after explaining in words why a proof works] Right. Somebody has to write this down, and I think it's me 

PROF COATES (Algebraic Curves, Lent 2000)

The algebraic ideals are just the ones we'd like to meet on the street

I define, you define, mankind defines...

There's no God-given class group - well, there's zero, but somehow that's not God-given, it's just... mankind's aberration

If you were slightly more mature... Sorry! That's in no way meant as an attack on your maturity. But if you were slightly more mature as mathematicians...

Let me remind you that there's no God-given local parameter. You can find them in the street.

These constants are never wrong when you get them right

If you meet an elliptic curve on the street and I ask you to add two points on it...

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