Mathematicians Hold Anaheim Convention : They Talk in Numbers and Joke in Tongues

Outfitted in a reddish-brown shirt and a polyester leisure suit that most closely resembled the color orange, James Stasheff was in his glory.

This was his turf and these were his people--some of the brightest mathematical minds in the United States and Canada. And soon, he would be offering his own contribution to the gathering of rumpled suits --a lecture on “Algebra deformations as cohomological perturbations.”

That translates to: “You study different ways of multiplying things together,” said Stasheff, a math instructor at the University of North Carolina.

Many of the more than 2,000 conventiongoers meeting at the Anaheim Convention Center and Anaheim Marriott Hotel admittedly are slightly eccentric and irreverent. They also are on the cutting edge of mathematics research.

Present are researchers and instructors from Harvard, Stanford, Purdue, MIT, Rutgers, UCLA and other leading institutions.

Hundreds of lectures will be presented on all levels of mathematical study. But the convention, which concludes on Sunday, is not for everyone.

Twins Mary and Sarah Rayburn, 18, may be “P.K.’s,” or “professors’ kids,” but they’re not the least interested in vectors or linear groups.

They came from Winnipeg with their father, Marlon C. Rayburn of the University of Manitoba, for other things, said Sarah, flashing a brochure of Disneyland and waving a pocket-sized camera.

“I wish they all could be California Girls,” she sang, while her sister rattled off the places they plan to visit, including Hollywood, Tijuana and Southern California’s beaches.

Math, nevertheless, is always around them. The temperature in Winnipeg was minus 24 degrees Celsius when they left, Sarah said. In Fahrenheit degrees, her father added quickly, that is “not too bad. Take the degrees in Celsius, multiply by nine, divide by five and add 32,” he explained.

The convention includes a math employment register and demonstrations and exhibits.

The conventioneers are not all seriousness, though.

For instance, one joke making the rounds is: “What’s non-orientable and lives at the bottom of the ocean?” Answer: “Mobius Dick.”

Groaning at the punch line, Andy Chermak of Kansas State University explained that to understand the joke you have to know that a Mobius strip is a surface with only one side, formed by giving a half twist to a narrow, rectangular strip of paper and then pasting its two ends together. The strip is “non-orientable” because there is no true north or south.

After all that, he acknowledged, the joke isn’t all that funny.

Another rib-tickler going around begins: “What’s yellow and implies the axiom of choice?”

Answer: “Zorn’s Lemon.”

(Although the joke is a pun, it helps, said Nora A. Hartsfield of Western Washington University, to know that Zorn’s LEMMA is a mathematics device in which each linearly ordered subset of a partially ordered set contains a maximal element. It’s also nice to know what an axiom of choice is. That’s defined as “recognition of the fact that the assertion really presupposes an axiom, called axiom of choice.”)

Mary Kellogg, of Manhattan Community College in New York, said there are some funny mathematics jokes. But, she said, “They’re very much inside jokes. The things that mathematicians laugh at generally would not be funny to anyone else.”