Orts #749
A farmer has a problem with foxes eating his hens. He asks his physicist friend for help. The physicist spends a day thinking, then comes back and reports, "Well, I've found a solution, but it will only work for spherical chickens of uniform density in a vacuum".
An engineer and a physicist are lost in a hot air balloon drifting down a canyon somewhere. While the physicist is trying to use the angle of the sun to figure out how long they have to find help before nightfall, the engineer is pragmatically scanning the ground looking for anything which might yield a clue to their whereabouts.
At last he sees a tiny spot on the ground that looks like it might be a person. He shouts "Hey! Hey, you down there! Where are we?” A voice replies, "you're in a hot air balloon, hundreds of feet above me.” The physicist remarks, "that must have been a mathematician.” “Why?” asks the engineer. "Because the answer was both completely correct and entirely useless.”
A mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer are hired by a farmer to build a fence that will enclose the largest possible area. The engineer decides to build a circular fence of huge diameter, since it’s the most efficient way of enclosing the most area. The physicist starts building a long, straight fence which, when complete, will circle the globe. The mathematician builds a small fence around himself and declares, “I'm on the outside!"
A mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer are taking their final test for a job. The sole question on the exam is "how much is one plus one?" The mathematician asks for a ream of paper. Two hours later, he announces: "I have proven it is a natural number”. The physicist, after checking parallax error and quantum tables, says: "it’s definitely between 1.9999999999 and 2.0000000001" The engineer quickly says: “Oh, that's easy! It’s two! . . . . no, wait a minute, better make it three, just to be on the safe side."