Deep Thoughts by Dennis Lewandowski For the uninitiated, Dennis is a mathematics professor up at Michigan Tech prone to saying the most spectacular things. He could double as the Delphi Oracle and never miss a beat: a true fountain of wisdom for these troubled days. Here is the collected list of quotes and wisdom from the man himself. "The number vascillates between zero and one." "Concave up means the function is shaped like a cup. Except, of course, that this is discrete mathematics, so the water would just fall right throught the function." "Minima. It's Latin. Latin words you just add an 'a' at the end." "If we hold the time constant, we can test the other variables." "Catch me if I write sloppy. Hint, hint." "We were looking for... What were we looking for?" "Now we're going to build a difference table!" "If it doesn't look like a straight line, then squint." "I'm somewhat dyslexic this morning." "There is a certain amount of bacteria in the soup." "We have puny minds and they're not able to handle all this information." "There's only room for so many rabbits. There's only food for so many rabbits. They'd probably start getting on each other's nerves and eating each other." Dennis: "We did them both. Wow. That's serendipity." Student: "Who?" "Now what you have to ask yourself is, do you feel lucky?" (admittedly not an original quote, but kudos for a decent effort) "Which was is left and which was is right? I'm slightly confused." "If you have fifty people in a building, there's more mixing, there's more reproduction. (pause) Keep your pictures to yourself." "The board must be crooked there." "Homogeneous is a weird word." Student: "What does A.H.S. stand for?" Dennis: "Associated Homogeneous Equation. Wait... where did the 'S' come from?" "Crack a book sometime, will ya?" "Test questions break down into fifths, much like drinking." "OK. What if we had foxes... (stops) Whoa. My mind just went off on a tangent." "If you would have ever read a book, you would know that conjecture means guessing. Uh, right?" (population growth using discrete mathematics) Dennis: "Let's assume everybody waits until New Years Eve, and then all the women plop out all these babies... That's one hell of a New Year's Eve." Student: "But if they all come out at the same time..." Dennis: "...pretty messy." "Nobody has a half a baby, or just one-third, just a leg or an arm." "I often do stupid things." "You have to know what to call something before you look it up." "What a wildabeast feels when being chased by a lion." "If the minors are very error - I mean, if the errors are very minor..." "You knew I was taking flying lessons, didn't you?" "Ouchie, ouchie, ouchie, that hurts like hell." "I need to take... I need to have more ginko." "Did I give you the problem set? No? That was dumb. (pause) No, that was disorganized." "I'm sorry, but you'll have to deal with words." (on solving a system of equations) "It's a problem solving thing. Like something McGuyver would do." "If I could reproduce my thinking, it would be a miracle." "That 200b showed up twice... it kind of spooked me for a second." "I recomend you read the manual, so you can suffer as much as I have." "We'll call that [variable] z. Or zed, depending on where you're from." "And now I will show you something cool." "Let's use u(4). As in euphoria." "I also found the calculator will build a table for you. So if you're eating on the floor..." "People who don't follow directions, I don't have any sympathy for!" "Mathmaticians aren't very good with numbers. That's why we always use x." "It's going to end up looking something like that (points to equation on board) or else it wouldn't be in the damn section." "You automatically get an A if you sign a contract. It's on my webage." "A rose by any other name is still one axis." "I had a 50% chance of getting it right, which means I had a 100% chance of getting it wrong." (woman walks into the classroom and points a finger at Dennis) Woman: "What's going on in here?" Dennis: "You're going to lose that finger." "Oh hell." "There is more than one path to enlightenment. As long as you show me what your path is." "I'm just regurgitating what's in the book." "Oh shit, I was thinking of cosine. I was thinking ahead." "The famous 'f' for fudge." Dennis: "Here you can use vanilla, here you can use chocolate. Here you can use..." (pause) Student: "...Strawberry?" Dennis: (blinks) "Yeah. For some reason I wanted to say sunflower." "We could actually go through and build the sundaes, and eat them... that would be more fun." "This isn't exactly rocket scientist. I mean, rocket science." "555 is not a real exchange [for a telephone number]. Just like Kahula Scotch is not a real drink." Dennis: "Has anybody ever seen that show? The one where the chef comes in and cooks dinner from leftovers? (student raises hand) You have!? Student: "Uh, no. I have a question." Dennis: "Doesn't anybody watch the Food Channel!?" "It [the population] is going to be greater than 34,000 - that's why it's a sick town - a town without pity." "These are no longer independent, because strawberry and butterscotch make people throw up, something you definitely don't want, especially if you're on an airplane." "I try to keep the problems simple, because I'm simple-minded." "The ploblem only occurs when C3 drips over F6 and combines in the bottom of the ice cream cone to form an explosive mixture that blows the bottom of the cone out." "There's no sense of humor in this room at all." "That is a backwards state indeed. Maybe Wyoming, where they only have like 10 people." "You're all looking at me like I'm crazy... you're right." "These are part-time jobs, not pajamas. These are part-time grad schools, not pregnancies." "Some people are just too damn fussy." "The third beer doesn't taste like anything." "And now here's where the leap of faith comes in." "This is a yearbook picture problem, at least to begin with. It's going to turn into a math problem." "There are 24 different ways of arranging the same person." "Everybody knows you can fit a certain number of people in a picture, otherwise you run out of dyes for the picture... (pause) I'm making that up." "They're kind of beating you over the head with a baseball bat, or a round-pointed shovel in this case." "My second watch is now dead. I must have bought them at the same time." "Two Cs, two Us, two As, two Vs... (attempting to spell vacuum)" "But I will be here, ready to charge on, teaching Functions, Change, and Chance..." "You can say to some guy cleaning the floor, "You, go in there with the geiger counter and measure the radiation... wear a lead apron."" "If you send that to the FBI, I'll have to kill you." "This is somewhat old data, or at least somebody made it up." "It's hard for you to deal with words when you're trying to write a [computer] program." "You don't have blue attractive gloves that automatically attract blue marbles." "If you don't get head you get tail." "What the hell is in the bubbles in Swiss Cheese? Is that just air?" "Everybody give him a pat on the back, or beat the hell out of him after class." "I went to Hooked on Phonics." "Aw, crap. Let's be honest about it - I don't know how to do this problem." "I could get a man here. I could get a woman." "Philosophy major. She'll be living with her parents." "Where the hell am I getting these numbers from? I think I'm just pulling them out of my ass." Student: "It would be different for males and females." Dennis: "But Henry Brewster is a transexual." "Who made me say that? Stop it!" "What the hell!? It [the chalk] is not sticking! This is really pissing me off." "So she was snorting diet coke, but all the bubbles got stuck in her nose." "I don't know where I was going with that. Well, I knew where I was going... but I shouldn't have gone there." "Never memorize anything you can look up." "Let's do it to them before they do it to us." "Oh, there's another subset there... haha... you're looking at me like I'm nuts." "Ah, there's some other crap in this chapter." Dennis: "The probability is 2/15. Why?" Student: "Basic math!" "If you look at this course in totality, you'll see that there's not very much in it." Dennis: "My opinion of this book is that it's a piece of ... it would make good toilet paper." Student: "I don't know about that." Dennis: "What, too slippery?" Student: "No, papercuts." "I'm babbling again, I can feel it." "Go forth and calculate."

Last Updated: February 1, 2001 Top Home E-mail