A post of no significant meaning, other than to remember not to ever invite mathematicians into your house, or elephants for that matter

Several Mathematicians get together for a party. During the hors devours, they notice there is a large white elephant in the room gobbling all the peanuts. Not knowing what to do about it, they asked the only scientist who was willing to come to the party: Newton. Newton declared that through the laws of motion, the colder the elephant is, the slower he would continue to eat the peanuts (newton suggested they use alchemy to turn the elephant into gold, but the mathematicians pointed out this would do nothing to change the elephants intake speed). Therefore, they elected to put the elephant into the refrigerator. They divided into groups to decide the best way to fit the elephant into the refrigerator...

Libnez and Newton (fathers of calculus) voted to differentiate the elephant, and place it into the fridge. Then, they would integrate the elephant again. The constant turned out to be the elephant’s tail, which was thereafter curled into a C.

Euclid and Pythagorus decided to factorize the elephant, place him and the parenthesis (the elephant’s large contact lenses) into the refridgerator, then multiply (they never did find the contact lenses). They also tried induction. By showing they could shove the elephants head and ears in the fridge, they knew they could always squeeze a bit more in.

Archimedes (geometry) suggested that since elephants float, and this one sinks, that is isn’t a real elephant. He insisted the owner of the house (the king of Syracuse) return the elephant and demand a real one. Soon the real one arrived, unnoticeably smaller (a few nanometers). Archimedes placed the real elephant on a lever and showed that he could lift the elephant into the air, saving valuable floor space. Of course Archimedes began drawing on the napkins, and got off the lever by mistake. The resulting crash was tremendous. Finally, Archimedes gave up and wrote a new axiom on a napkin: “the elephant can be put into a refrigerator. The other mathematicians were overjoyed with this statement. Meanwhile, the elephant began eating the couch.

Pascal, who was a food pyramid nut, showed that although the elephant would never fit in the dessert section, he would fit in the double deluxe grains section of his triangle near the bottom. The refrigerator took on a different shape, but the elephant fit.

Fermat, out to show up Euclid and Pythagorus, insisted that you can fit not only one elephant, but three elephants and their kids (aⁿ+bⁿ=cⁿ) into the referidgerator. Unfortunately, Archimedes had used all the napkins to write on, and Fermat never did have a chance to test his theory.

Diophantus (father of agebra) also showed that parts of the elephant could fit into the refrigerator. He placed one paw into the refrigerator, then launched into a 40 minute explanation of the fundamental theorem of algebra, having nothing whatsoever to do with the poor elephant getting his paw cold. Diophantus then spent 20 seconds explaining that the refrigerator was closed under addition, so therefore the rest of the elephant would fit.

Descarte, who first pointed out the elephant (“I think there is an elephant in the room, therefore there is”), brought up a Cartesian refrigerator which had a secret compartment (Z-Plane) in which he stuffed the elephant. Despite his brilliant solution, the mathematicians told him not to point out any more elephants.

Felix Klein, (Topology) who had been complaining all night about the inefficient use of space suggested a few ideas for fitting the elephant into the refrigerator. He first suggested that since the elephant was so hungry, let it eat the refrigerator to save space, then turn the elephant inside out, saving even more space. Secondly, he insisted he got his design for the Klein bottle finished correctly this time, and to build a refrigerator in the shape of a Klein bottle. Finally, in desperation, he pointed out size is hereditary, and thus if the cremated ashes of the mother elephant would fit, so would the white elephant (he got out-voted due to animal cruelty on the last point. He can be excused though, his own Klein refrigerator at home is very hard to extract food from).

A couple of nameless statisticians had the least help to offer. They proudly demonstrated that their complicated formula allowed them to place the elephant’s trunk into the refrigerator. When the mathematicians asked about the rest of the elephant in the kitchen, they referred to that as a 40% margin of error. They further asserted that they were 90% sure that nobody would mind, and the bell curve only required a 68% satisfaction rate. The third statistician spent the rest of the night repeatedly trying to shove the elephant into the refrigerator with a plunger.