An Engineer, a Physicist, and a Mathematician all go to the same Conference.
University budgets being what they are, they all stay in the same cheap
hotel.

Each room has the same floor plan, has the same cheap TV, the same cheap
bed, and a small bathroom. Instead of a sprinkler system, the hotel has
opted for Fire Buckets.

The Engineer, Physicist, and Mathematician are all asleep in bed. At
about 2AM, the Engineer wakes up because he smells smoke. He looks in the
corner of the room and sees that the TV set is on fire! He dashes into
the bathroom, fills the Fire Bucket to overflowing with water, and drenches
the TV set. The fire goes out, and the Engineer goes back to sleep.

A little while later, the Physicist wakes because he smells smoke. He
looks in the corner and sees that the TV set is on fire. He grabs a handy
envelope, estimates the BTU output of the fire, scribbles a quick calculation,
then dashes into the bathroom and fills the Fire Bucket with just enough
water to douse the flames. He puts the fire out and goes back to sleep.

In a little while, the Mathematician wakes up to the smell of smoke. 
He looks in the corner and sees the TV on fire. He looks into the bathroom
and sees the Fire Bucket. Having determined that a solution exists, he
goes back to sleep.

The Height of Intellect

A physics student once got the following question in an exam:

“You are given an accurate barometer. How would you use it to determine
the height of a skyscraper?”

He answered, “Go to the top floor, tie a long piece of string to the
barometer, let it down ’till it touches the ground and measure the length
of the string.”

The examiner wasn’t satisfied, so they decided to interview the guy:

“Can you give us another method, one which demonstrates your knowledge
of Physics?”

“Sure, go to the top floor, drop the barometer off, and measure how
long before it hits the ground…”

“Not, quite what we wanted, care to try again?”

“Make a pendulum of the barometer, measure its period at the bottom,
then measure its period at the top…”

“…another try?….”

“Measure the length of the barometer, then mount it vertically on the
ground on a sunny day and measure its shadow, measure the shadow of the
skyscraper…”

“…and again?…”

“walk up the stairs and use the barometer as a ruler to measure the
height of the walls in the stairwells.”

“…One more try?”

“Find where the janitor lives, knock on his door and say ‘Please, Mr.
Janitor, if I give you this nice barometer, will you tell me the height
of this building?'”

Not Quite All There

A Mathematician, a Biologist and a Physicist are sitting in a street cafe
watching people going in and coming out of the house on the other side
of the street. First they see two people going into the house. Time passes. 
After a while they notice three persons coming out of the house.

The Physicist: “The measurement wasn’t accurate”.

The Biologist:  “They have reproduced”.

The Mathematician:  “If now exactly 1 person enters the house then
it will be empty again.”

Circular Thinking

An engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician are shown a pasture with
a herd of sheep, and told to put them inside the smallest possible amount
of fence.

The engineer is first.  He herds the sheep into a circle and then
puts the fence around them, declaring, “A circle will use the least fence
for a given area, so this is the best solution.”

The physicist is next.  She creates a circular fence of infinite
radius around the sheep, and then draws the fence tight around the herd,
declaring, “This will give the smallest circular fence around the herd.”

The mathematician is last.  After giving the problem a little thought,
he puts a small fence around himself and then declares, “I define myself
to be on the outside!”

One Plus One

A mathematician, an engineer, and a physicist are being interviewed for
a job. In each case, the interview goes along famously until the last question
is asked: “How much is one plus one?”

Each of them suspects a trap, and is hesitant to answer. The mathematician
thinks for a moment, and says “I’m not sure, but I think it converges”.

The physicist says “I’m not sure, but I think it’s on the order of one”

The engineer gets up, closes the door to the office, and says “How much
do you want it to be?”

Problem Solving

In a foreign country a priest, a lawyer and an engineer are all about to
be guillotined.

The priest puts his head on the block, they pull the rope and nothing
happens — he declares that he’s been saved by divine intervention — so
he’s let go.

The lawyer is put on the block, and again the rope doesn’t release the
blade,  he claims he can’t be executed twice for the same crime and
he is set free too.

They grab the engineer and shove his head into the guillotine, he looks
up at the release mechanism and says, “Oh, wait a minute, I see your problem……”

Professional Projections

When considering the behaviour of a howitzer projectile:

•  A mathematician will be able to calculate where the shell will land.
•  A physicist will be able to explain why it will land there.
•  An engineer will try to catch it.

That’s Using Your Head

An Engineering Student, a Physics Student, and a Mathematics student were
each given $150 dollars and were told to use that money to find out exactly
how tall a particular hotel was.

All three ran off, extremely keen on how to do this.

The physics student went out, purchased some stopwatches, a number of
ball bearings, a calculator, and some friends.  He had them all time
the drop of ball bearings from the roof, and he then figured out the height
from the time it took for the bearings to accelerate from rest until they
impacted with the sidewalk.

The math student waited until the sun was going down, then she took
out her protractor, plumb line, measuring tape, and scratch pad, measured
the length of the shadow, found the angle the buildings roof made from
the ground, and used trigonometry to figure out the height of the building.

Of course, with all that was involved in getting this experiment done,
they were up plenty late studying for other courses’ exams.

These two students bumped into the engineering student the next day,
who looked quite refreshed.  When asked what he did to find the height
of the building he replied:

“Well, I walked up to the bell hop, gave him 10 bucks, asked him how
tall the hotel was, and went inside for happy hour!”

Legally Dead

The Journal of the Massachusetts Bar recorded this exchange between an
anonymous attorney and a pathologist in a recent murder trial:

“Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?”

“No.”

“Did you check for breathing?”

“No.”

“So then, is it possible that the patient was alive when you began the
autopsy?”

“No.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.”

Even then, this would-be Perry Mason refused to throw in the towel:

“Is it possible the patient could be alive, nevertheless?”

“It is possible that he could have been alive,” said the pathologist,
“and practicing the law somewhere.”