## Archive for February 28, 2015

### Deliver Us Not Into Bad Math

What better way to celebrate National Pizza Day than sharing this sign, which hangs in our local Pizza Hut:

Admittedly, I’ve never been very good with proportions, but even I know that

$\frac{3}{14} \ne \frac{5}{30}$.

Yet, that’s what’s implied by the statements for $3 and$5 in the sign. Further,

• For $1, you can feed 4 children for 1 day. That’s a daily rate of 25.0¢ per child. • For$3, you can feed 2 children for 7 days. That’s a daily rate of 21.4¢ per child.
• For $5, you can feed 1 child for 30 days. That’s a daily rate of 16.7¢ per child. Will the real price per child per day please stand up? And then I took a look at that last statement — that$10 can feed a classroom for a day — and it really blew my mind. Daily rates of 16.7 to 25.0¢ per child imply that classrooms have 40 to 60 students. I don’t know where these hungry students are, but maybe there should be a secondary campaign to reduce class size?

Though let’s be honest. What really seems to be needed here is an entirely new campaign:

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.