Title: An Engineer, a Mathematician and a Fire
General Information about Item:
- Verbal lore, joke
- Language: English
- Country of Origin: United States
- Informant: Sean Smith
- Date Collected: 5-23-19
Informant Data:
- Sean Smith is a 54 year old computer science professor at Dartmouth College. He teaches classes such as COSC 51, Computer Architecture, and COSC 58, Operating Systems. He is a self taught computer scientist, as there was no computer science major when he was an undergrad. He worked for the US government doing security consulting and then worked at IBM doing product development. At Dartmouth, he works on systems, as opposed to the more theoretical and mathematical side of computer science.
Contextual Data:
- Cultural Context: This joke provides a comparison of two related but different fields, with the engineer being seen in a more positive light. The engineer is portrayed as practical and efficient, while the mathematician is implied to be disconnected from the real world because he is applying techniques used for proving mathematical theorems to a life or death situation.
- Social Context: The joke was recorded during an in-person interview with the informant. The informant is not sure where he heard this joke, or where he would have said it.
Item:
Interview Recording:
Transcript of joke:
- (4:18) “An engineer wakes up in a…, um, wakes up in a room and it’s on fire, but there is an empty bucket in the sink, so he fills the bucket with water and puts the fire out. A mathematician wakes up in a room and there’s a fire and there’s a full bucket of water and a sink and is like, ‘oh, now I’ve reduced it to the previous case.'”
Informant’s Comments:
- This joke makes fun of how, in mathematical proofs, the efficiency does not matter as much as correctness.
Collector’s Comments:
- The full interview contains lots of examples of engineering and computer science folklore other than jokes.
Collector’s Name: Ben Wolsieffer
Tags/Keywords:
- Engineering
- Verbal Folklore
- Joke
- Comparison between fields