My Favorite One-Liners: Part 13

In this series, I’m compiling some of the quips and one-liners that I’ll use with my students to hopefully make my lessons more memorable for them.

Here’s a story that I’ll tell my students when, for the first time in a semester, I’m about to use a previous theorem to make a major step in proving a theorem. For example, I may have just finished the proof of

,

where and are independent random variables, and I’m about to prove that

.

While this can be done by starting from scratch and using the definition of variance, the easiest thing to do is to write

,

thus using the result of the first theorem to prove the next theorem.

And so I have a little story that I tell students about this principle. I think I was 13 when I first heard this one, and obviously it’s stuck with me over the years.

At MIT, there’s a two-part entrance exam to determine who will be the engineers and who will be the mathematicians. For the first part of the exam, students are led one at a time into a kitchen. There’s an empty pot on the floor, a sink, and a stove. The assignment is to boil water. Everyone does exactly the same thing: they fill the pot with water, place it on the stove, and then turn the stove on. Everyone passes.

For the second part of the exam, students are led one at a time again into the kitchen. This time, there’s a pot full of water sitting on the stove. The assignment, once again, is to boil water. Nearly everyone simply turns on the stove. These students are led off to become engineers. The mathematicians are ones who take the pot off the stove, dump the water into the sink, and place the empty pot on the floor… thereby reducing to the original problem, which had already been solved.