Colm O'Dunlaing

From Mathsoc wiki

A collection of jokes and statements allegedly made by the legend that is Colm O Dunlaing (Mathsoc President 2007-2008).

• "Is this line baffling or crystal clear? It's just this equality sign. I'm very sorry about that."

• "There are three things here which are equivalent and two of them will be immediately useful. As for the third, I can't remember the use of that."

• "We're going on to something no more and no less abstract, but a little more familiar. And that is division."

• "I'm just going to state one more lemma that's so painful to work through that I'm not going to. It's almost as painful to write down, but that we'll have to live with."

• "a will always be 1625 and b will always be 299...at least they'll be that way for about four or five minutes."

• "Now, you will not mind if we don't prove this."

• "Amazingly, the result still holds, even though it makes no sense."

• "Now here's a question to which I don't really know the answer..."

• "It just strikes me that although that fact is obvious, it is not...obvious."

• "I have a strong feeling that it is an integral domain. Maybe it requires some proof."

• "And here's something I'm not really sure about..."

• "I nearly made one word out of 'a field'. There is as you know a word afield. It's a curious word. Can you be afield? You can go further afield. I would be willing to bet...*roots in pockets*...fifty cent that you can't be afield."

• "I never know when to stop calling things lemmas. I'm never sure when something is interesting enough to be called a theorem."

• "At the moment I can't remember why this is so."

• "Everything was perfectly ok, except for the very start."

• "Let x be an indeterminate. I don't know what that means, exactly..."

• "We'll be doing the sort of calculation that's been done since the year dot."

• "A right ideal is defined similarly. I leave that to your imaginations."

• "Let's not prove the claim. That's too hard. Let's look at a silly example."

• "This theorem is pretty well-defined. You can do most of it with your eyes shut."

• "There's a bit of mathematical mumbo-jumbo that you might want to go through..."

• "First of all, nobody would ask "Is five prime?" if it was."

• "It just introduces a rule for multiplying buckets."

• "...separates the elements into two buckets--I mean cosets..."

• (Draws a line down centre of blackboard. Steps back, examines it, shakes his head. Rubs it out and draws an identical line. Again, steps back, examines it, rubs it out. Draws another identical line down the centre of the blackboard.)"If I don't get the line perfectly in the middle, I won't be able to step on the cracks for a day."

• "I'm not quite sure if this is correct, but I'm willing to swallow it if you are. (Pause)Actually yes, I'm quite willing to swallow"

• "would you prefer me to use a vertical or a horizontal stroke? (pause) to clean the blackboard which is it?"

• "You won't find this in any textbook....I dreamt this up last week"

• "It's a complicated word for something that really isn't that simple anyway"

• A blown up condom is flying around the lecture theatre...Colm sees it and says "There was once a celebrated silent french film about a boy followed around by a red balloon"...returns to Matrix Algebra

• "There is no reason to believe the results are the same...except....they are the same!"

• "Here's something I like to do... now it might have no purpose"

• Guy leaves his lecture through the door down the front...Colm sees him and suddenly legs it across the lecture theatre out after him, terminator-style...returns several minutes later, studentless...continues with Matrix Algebra.

• Colm looks slightly confused by the pancake that has been left on the table for him on Pancake Tuesday. Slowly says..."But it's Ash Wednesday today...".

• Colm on probability: Asks the class "...So if I were to flip a coin, what is the probability of getting head?" The room erupts with laughter while the baffled Colm is left scratching his head and looking at the board to see what he did wrong. Then it finally clicks, followed by a cheeky grin and writing on the board "probability of getting A head".

• "In a word: Gauss-Jordan Elimination is not accurate."

• Program Colm is writing fails repeatedly. "Rats, it's all gone horribly wrong! You might as well just go now." The lecture ends 10 minutes early.

• In the first lecture of the Junior Freshman term: carefully writes up a string of binary. Rubs out a 0 saying "Oh sorry, that should be a 1". Finishes the string and says "Now, I don't exactly know what that is or what it does ... ".

• "So, how long will it take for the program to print out an infinite amount of lines?"

• Colm writes a simple program to add 1 to the integer 5. A student asks whether this function will return 6 or 7 the second time round. "Well, because the program is called cold, it will return the original value, which is 6". Writes 7 on the board and steps away, before leaping back to amend ...

• I cannot imagine any universe in which the showing of a goat could bias probability... (on the Monty Hall problem)

• Student: Sorry, could you explain what's going on? I missed the last lecture.

Colm starts explaining, pauses, then says "Well I'm not going to give the entire lecture again just for you," before returning to the explanation. ...

• Same Student: So why would you want to do this in the real world?

Colm stops in his tracks, scratches his head, and then exclaims: "Well why would you want to do anything in the real world?"

• "Of course this is handwaving. A correct proof was included in a paper which I have lost whose

title and authors, apart from Michael S. Paterson, I have forgotten." Q.E.D.

• After writing a lemma on the board, "Either this result is very obvious or very unobvious, I cannot remember"