![]() ![]() I would sometimes tell that joke during a lecture or something and people would then email me jokes. So that joke was in my first book because it gave a hint at the precise, rigorous nature of mathematics, and in fact I think that joke was in one of Ian Stewart's books that I read as a teenager. The astronomer looks out the window and says, 'Look, all sheep in Scotland must be black.' And the physicist, who is a bit more precise, says, 'No, no, only some sheep in Scotland must be black.' And the mathematician looks at the other two, shakes his head and says, 'No, no, no, gentlemen, all we can truly say is that there exists in Scotland at least one field containing at least one sheep, one side of which is black.' ![]() My first book was Fermat's Last Theorem, and in that book I told a joke about…I'll tell it to you now very quickly, it's about a mathematician, a physicist and an astronomer who are on holiday and they are going to Scotland and they cross the border and they see a field containing a black sheep. Are these jokes made up by your good self? ![]() ![]() Robyn Williams: That'll get the three-year-olds and the 55-year-olds going. A very sweet little joke for people who can at least count from one to ten. Simon Singh: So a very simple one to start off with is why did five eat six? Because seven ate nine. Robyn Williams: Simon Singh has written a book about all the science and maths on The Simpsons, and it's full of jokes. ![]()
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