Stats/Math Jokes

An accountant is having a hard time sleeping and goes to see his doctor.

- Doctor, I just can't get to sleep at night.

- Have you tried counting sheep?

- That's the problem - I make a mistake and then spend three hours trying to find it.

A professor of mathematics sent a fax to his wife. It read:

"Dear wife,
You must realize that you are 54 years old and I have certain needs which you are no longer able to satisfy. I am otherwise happy with you as a wife, and I sincerely hope you will not be hurt or offended to learn that by the time you receive this letter, I will be at the Grand Hotel with my 18-year-old teaching assistant. I'll be home before midnight.
Your Husband"

When he arrived at the hotel, there was a faxed letter waiting for him that read as follows:

"Dear Husband,
You too are 54 years old, and by the time you receive this, I will be at the Breakwater Hotel with the 18-year-old pool boy. Being the brilliant mathematician that you are, you can easily appreciate the fact that 18 goes into 54 a lot more times than 54 goes into 18. Don't wait up."

An Indian chief had three wives, each of whom was pregnant. The first gave birth to a boy. The chief was so elated he built her a teepee made of deer hide. A few days later, the second gave birth, also to a boy. The chief was very happy. He built her a teepee made of antelope hide. The third wife gave birth a few days later, but the chief kept the details a secret. He built this one a two story teepee, made out of a hippopotamus hide. The chief then challenged the tribe to guess what had occurred.

Many tried, unsuccessfully. Finally, one young brave declared that the third wife had given birth to twin boys.

"Correct," said the chief. "How did you figure it out?"

The warrior answered, "It's elementary. The value of the squaw of the hippopotamus is equal to the sons of the squaws of the other two hides."

So you want a day off. Let's take a look at what you are asking for. There are 365 days per year available for work. There are 52 weeks per year in which you already have 2 days off per week, leaving 261 days available for work. Since you spend 16 hours each day away from work, you have used up 170 days, leaving only 91 days available. You spend 30 minutes each day on coffee break which counts for 23 days each year, leaving only 68 days available. With a 1 hour lunch each day, you used up another 46 days, leaving only 22 days available for work. You normally spend 2 days per year on sick leave. This leaves you only 20 days per year available for work. We are off 5 holidays per year, so your available working time is down to 15 days. We generously give 14 days vacation per year which leaves only 1 day available for work and I'll be darned if you are going to take that day off!

It is often cited that there are half as many divorces as marriages in the US, so one concludes that average marriages have a 50% chance of ending by divorce. While I was a graduate student, among my peers there were twice as many divorces as marriages, leading us to conclude that average marriages would end twice...

A shoeseller meets a mathematician and complains that he does not know what size shoes to buy. "No problem," says the mathematician, "there is a simple equation for that," and he shows him the Gaussian normal distribution. The shoeseller stares some time at the equation and asks, "What is that symbol?" "That is the Greek letter pi." "What is pi?" "That is the ratio between the circumference and the diameter of a circle." Upon this the shoeseller cries out: "What does a circle have to do with shoes?!"

There was this statistics student who, when driving his car, would always accelerate hard before coming to any junction, whizz straight over it, then slow down again once he'd got over it. One day, he took a passenger, who was understandably unnerved by his driving style, and asked him why he went so fast over junctions. The statistics student replied, "Well, statistically speaking, you are far more likely to have an accident at a junction, so I just make sure that I spend less time there."

A new government 10 year survey cost $3,000,000,000 revealed that 3/4 of the people in America make up 75% of the population.

According to recent surveys, 51% of the people are in the majority.

Did you know that 87.166253% of all statistics claim a precision of results that is not justified by the method employed?

80% of all statistics quoted to prove a point are made up on the spot.

According to a recent survey, 33 of the people say they participate in surveys.

What do you call a statistician on drugs?
→ A high flyer.

How many statisticians does it take to change a lightbulb?
→ 1-3, alpha = .05

There is no truth to the allegation that statisticians are mean. They are just your standard normal deviates.

Did you hear about the statistician who invented a device to measure the weight of trees?
→ It's referred to as the log scale.

Did you hear about the statistician who took the Dale Carnegie course?
→ He improved his confidence from .95 to .99.

Why don't statisticians like to model new clothes?
→ Lack of fit.

Did you hear about the statistician who was thrown in jail?
→ He now has zero degrees of freedom.

Statisticians must stay away from children's toys because they regress so easily.

The only time a pie chart is appropriate is at a baker's convention.

Never show a bar chart at an AA meeting.

Old statisticians never die, they just undergo a transformation.

How do you tell one bathroom full of statisticians from another?
→ Check the p-value.

Did you hear about the statistician who made a career change and became an surgeon specializing in ob/gyn?
→ His specialty was histerectograms.

The most important statistic for car manufacturers is autocorrelation.

Some statisticians don't drink because they are t-test totalers. Others drink the hard stuff as evidenced by the proliferation of box-and-whiskey plots.

Underwater ship builders are concerned with sub-optimization.

The Lipton Company is big on statistics--especially t-tests.

1. They speak only the Greek language.
2. They usually have long threatening names such as Bonferonni, Tchebycheff, Schatzoff, Hotelling, and Godambe. Where are the statisticians with names such as Smith, Brown, or Johnson?
3. They are fond of all snakes and typically own as a pet a large South American snake called an ANOCOVA.
4. For perverse reasons, rather than view a matrix right side up they prefer to invert it.
5. Rather than moonlighting by holding Amway parties they earn a few extra bucks by holding pocket-protector parties.
6. They are frequently seen in their back yards on clear nights gazing through powerful amateur telescopes looking for distant star constellations called ANOVA's.
7. They are 99% confident that sleep can not be induced in an introductory statistics class by lecturing on z-scores.
8. Their idea of a scenic and exotic trip is traveling three standard deviations above the mean in a normal distribution.
9. They manifest many psychological disorders because as young statisticians many of their statistical hypotheses were rejected.
10. They express a deap-seated fear that society will someday construct tests that will enable everyone to make the same score. Without variation or individual differences the field of statistics has no real function and a statistician becomes a penniless ward of the state.

A mathematician and a non-mathematician are sitting in an airport hall waiting for their flight to go. The non has terrible flight panic.

"Hey, don't worry, it's just every 10000th flight that crashes."

"1:10000? So much? Then it surely will be mine!"

"Well, there is an easy way out. Simply take the next plane. It's much more probable that you go from a crashing to a non-crashing plane than the other way round. So you are already at 1:10000 squared."