My Favorite One-Liners: Part 38

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.

When I was a student, I heard the story (probably apocryphal) about the mathematician who wrote up a mathematical paper that was hundreds of pages long and gave it to the departmental administrative assistant to type. (This story took place many years ago before the advent of office computers, and so typewriters were the standard for professional communication.) The mathematician had written “iff” as the standard abbreviation for “if and only if” since typewriters did not have a button for the symbol.

Well, so the story goes, the administrative assistant saw all of these “iff”s, muttered to herself about how mathematicians don’t know how to spell, and replaced every “iff” in the paper with “if”.

And so the mathematician had to carefully pore through this huge paper, carefully checking if the word “if” should be “if” or “iff”.

I have no idea if this story is true or not, but it makes a great story to tell students.