2y ago

Simple to say but hard to solve

(Inspired by Reddit post of the last month)

30 comments

Looks like the sound holes of a violin to me.
- Oh look, it's a music major.
- But they are not. Those are called f-holes.
  
  F-holes are the name specifically for the holes in the violin family and the contrabass. The more general term is sound hole, which also includes the c-holes of the viol family or the large round hole of a guitar.
  F-holes, in particular, are shaped pretty much exactly like an integration sign.
Thanks to my TI-89 I got a 3 on the AP Calc test and still don't get this joke.
- Out of 100?
  
  AP scores go from 1 to 5, with 5 being the best. A 3 indicates an average score. It will most likely not be enough to pass out of a college course, unless the university is less intensive in its calculus courses.
It's merely a slightly longer sum, so what's the problem?
- I get the feeling you haven't solved many.
  
  What a curious and needlessly judgmental reply!
  
  I mean they're right, Leibniz used a modified s for summa, sum. And an integral is just a sum, an infinite sum over infinitesimal summands, but a sum nevertheless.
- It mentions x^5
  
  Just a polynomial is the easy case, though. Once you start adding other operations, then it gets spicy.
  
  See folks? Meeting dry humor with dry humor---this is the way.
- Longer? Or infinitesimal?
  
  ACKTUALLY neither. It's most simply thought of as a limit of progressively longer sums. Infinitesimals help people understand ~~but they're kind of logically questionable.~~
What does the symbol mean in linguistics?
- voiceless post-alveolar fricative :)

30 comments