## Prime Twins

When my wife gave birth to our sons, Alex and Eli, I was so excited that I called the minister immediately. “Reverend,” I said, “Nadine just gave birth to twin boys!”

“That’s fantastic!” he replied. “Why don’t you bring ’em down to the church on Sunday, and we’ll baptize ’em.”

“How ’bout we just baptize one,” I said. “Let’s keep the other as a control.”

It can be difficult to tell that my sons are identical twins. The picture below, for instance, is a red herring — though they’re identical, Alex is using a TI Math Explorer purely for computation, while Eli clearly prefers the graphing capabilities of a TI‑73.

Prior to their birth, I tried to imagine mathematical names. There are, of course, many pedantic possibilities…

• Area and Perimeter (Ari and Peri, for short)
• Max and Min
• Vector and Scalar
• Abscissa and Ordinate
• Sine and Cosine

But I’m not one to settle for low-hanging fruit. I pushed myself to find better options.

• If and Only If
• Vector and Sector
• Perp and Dicular
• Johann and Jakob
• Catenary and Parabola (Cat and Perry, for short)
• Lucas Cameron Maximilian and Gregory Caliban Farquhar (aka, LCM and GCF)

Today, my perfect sons turn the perfect age — six! And though I wasn’t able to convince my wife that Epsilon and Delta would have been perfect names, I have to admit that Alex and Eli suit them just fine.

What are your suggestions for mathy twin names?

Entry filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: , , , .

• 1. xander  |  May 2, 2013 at 11:07 am

When my wife and I were still trying to get pregnant, I suggested that it would be great to have twins. We could name one Control, and the other Variable. She was not amused.

At the end of last year, my office mate had twins (well, more accurately, his wife had twins). I suggested that he name them Epsilon and Delta. I think he went with something more traditionally Nepalese. I did, however, get him a set of onsies with the letters $\varepsilon$ and $\delta$ on them. 😉

(And maybe this time I got the LaTeX tag right.)

xander

• 2. venneblock  |  May 3, 2013 at 8:47 am

Indeed, Xander! The LaTeX looks great. You’ve proven that an old dog can learn new tricks.

• […] Prime Twins (mathjokes4mathyfolks.wordpress.com) […]

The Math Jokes 4 Mathy Folks blog is an online extension to the book Math Jokes 4 Mathy Folks. The blog contains jokes submitted by readers, new jokes discovered by the author, details about speaking appearances and workshops, and other random bits of information that might be interesting to the strange folks who like math jokes.

## MJ4MF (offline version)

Math Jokes 4 Mathy Folks is available from Amazon, Borders, Barnes & Noble, NCTM, Robert D. Reed Publishers, and other purveyors of exceptional literature.