Whole Real Line

I have to introduce a few things to you before I can unleash a whole slew of jokes.

1.  The empty set, denoted by ∅ or {}, is a set which contains--nothing.  It is by definition empty.  

As it turns out, we can't prove that such a creature exists.  We just have to either accept that it does, or not accept it.  (More on this some other time.) Generally, we accept the statement "There is a set for whom no object is a member" as being true.

2.  A statement which asserts that something is true for all members of the empty set is called a vacuous truth.  For example, if I say, "All my balls are blue," but I have no balls (ie: the set of balls belonging to Charlie is empty), then my statement would be called vacuously true.

In fact, if the set of balls belonging to Charlie is empty, I can make two simultaneous assertions: "All my balls are blue and all my balls are pink," and since they are both true, their conjunction is also true.

This leads to a boatload of jokes! 

First, because the symbol ∅ looks superficially similar to the Greek letter θ (theta), I've toyed with the idea of distributing some pamphlets filled with vacuous truths about trigonometric functions, hoping first-year students will mistake ∅ for θ, a symbol commonly used to represent the value of an unknown angle.  

Hi Tumblr, 

My name is Charlie and I really love math!  I think it's beautiful and wonderful and scary and fucked up and sometimes even useful! 

In studying math for the past eight-ish years, I've found that math-people have their own subculture. We have our own brands of humour.  We simultaneously know we have some strange neuroses, and we love it, and kind of don't let that knowledge stop us from continuing to be our crazy, lovable selves. 

Yes, I know, there are some poor math educators out there, and that's an unfortunate statistical reality of the world.  If you had a terrible experience because of such a person, that is very unfortunate, and I'd like to offer you a (very Canadian) apology on behalf of math educators, and also this blog! 

This vision I have for this blog is a place where I can write anecdotally and conversationally about some cool things in math and math culture.  By doing so, I hope to both pass along some useful and/or stimulating knowledge (and/or humour), and inspire awe and/or curiosity in my readers, or at least show that math can be friendly. 

In general, I will aim to write for a grade nine reading ability (because someone once told me that's the standard for newspapers).  But probably, there will be some posts with profane language and "mature subjects" now and then.  After all, one of the goals of this blog is to show how ubiquitous mathematics is. 

But since another goal is to capture math humour, sometimes I will use math terminology.  I have yet to figure out how to best combine both the educational aspect and the FUCK YOU AND YOUR ASS-BACKWARDS NOTATION spontaneity of the humour, but I'll figure it out.  I mean, the two don't seem mutually exclusive to me.