Mathematical jokes: the critical jokes for critical thinkers. 





Mathematical jokes have served as a form of humor for mathematicians and lovers of mathematics for centuries. The humor may come from a pun or from a double meaning of mathematical term or sometimes from a layman's misunderstanding of a certain mathematical concept for example the mathematical number $\pi$ may be misunderstood by a layman as pie, which is a meat dish baked with biscuit usually eaten after meals or eaten with drinks as a junk.
Many mathematicians have been known to use mathematical jokes as a reliable teaching methodology for students, and it has proven to be efficient in accelerating students understanding and comprehension. 
Mathematical humors may be classified into the esoteric and exoteric categories.
Esoteric jokes rely on the intrinsic knowledge of mathematics while the exoteric jokes are intelligible to the outsiders. 
Some jokes are based on the imaginary numbers $i$ where it is been treated as a real number for example "what did $\pi$ say to $i$". Some jokes are based on stereotypes of mathematicians, mathematicians are known to detest making hasty generalization from a small amount of data, even if some generalization seems plausible. Example of a popular joke is:
An astronomer, a physicist and a mathematician are on a train in Scotland. The astronomer looks out of the window, sees a black sheep standing in a field, and remarks, "How odd. All the sheep in Scotland are black!" "No, no, no!" says the physicist. "Only some Scottish sheep are black." The mathematician rolls his eyes at his companions' muddled thinking and says, "In Scotland, there is at least one sheep, at least one side of which appears to be black from here some of the time."
Some jokes  are derived from common misunderstanding of mathematical concepts just as mentioned above, and they seem to be the most common type of joke, exmaple:
A museum visitor who was a scientist was admiring a Tyrannosaurus fossil, and asked a nearby museum employee how old it was. "That skeleton's sixty-five million and three years, two months and eighteen days old," the employee replied. "How can you be so precise?" she asked. "Well, when I started working here, I asked a scientist the exact same question, and he said it was sixty-five million years old—and that was three years, two months and eighteen days ago."
Unfortunately, the employee fails to understand the scientist's implication of the uncertainty in the age of the fossil and uses false precision by addding her number of workdays since she started work to the age of the fossil.
Other forms of jokes obtained from a mathematical misunderstanding, includes mock jokes where a person using weird methods to solve a mathematical problem, example:



One popular joke made by mathematicians themselves is that, mathematical topologists can not differentiate a coffee cup from a doughnut since homeomorphism causes a continuous deformation of a coffee mug into a doughnut. 

Examples of pun based mathematical jokes. 
  1. $\sqrt{-1}(8)\pi$ this can be interpreted as "i ate pie" since $\sqrt{-1}=i$
  2.  Person 1: What's the integral of $\frac{1} {cabin}$ with respect to cabin?                                             Person 2: A log cabin. ( remember, the integral of any function $\frac{1}{x}$ is a log function).                 Person 1: No, a houseboat; you forgot to add the C (sea)! 😂 
  3. Q: Why do mathematicians confuse Halloween and Christmas?                 A: Because 31 Oct = 25 Dec. This was derived from the mathematical calculation, let Oct=octal and Dec=decimal, therefore, $31_8=25_{10}$.