Roman Algebra

Q: Why was Algebra so easy for the Romans?
A: X was always 10.

Misunderstood People

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.

Purchasing The Shoes

A shoe-seller 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 shoe-seller stares at the equation for some time, then 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 shoe-seller cries out: "What does a circle have to do with shoes?!"