This is about the famous "engineer-mathematician-physicist jokes"
Please see here to get the original story:
The Hotel Fire
An engineer, a mathematician, and a physicist are staying for the night in a hotel. Fortunately for this joke, a small fire breaks out in each room. The physicist awakes, sees the fire, makes some careful observations......,
see more from http://www.farmdale.com/emp-jokes.shtml
I was thinking: if the fire was bigger ---When they saw it, it was about the size that is impossible to put out but only appear promising. What will they do?
Physicist still observe and calculate with the caliberation on the fire's time-progress, then he got the answer that it is impossible for him to get the necessary amount of flow rate to extinguish the fire, so he escapes.
Mathematician also "proved" that there is no "solution" and escaped.
Engineer thinks it promising in his usual intuitive fashion and tried to put it out but the fire never went out.......luckily, his knowledge about safety guided him to do all his effort on the solid ground of his own safety, so he escaped when the last possible exit is about to be closed by fire.
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I think it is always better to know the real situation.
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4 comments:
The version you linked seems to be overly admiring the physicist and cutting the engineer short. If the fire grows too big the engineer being practical will be first to realize. The mathematician will need a little time to construct an impossibility proof but will also quickly escape. Sadly the physicist having invested to much prestige in his puttingoutfiron particle theory will perish in the fire.
Happy that you left such a well-thought comment. I realy wish to find a situation where the mathematician performs great because the original story make them look so awkward. There must be some circumstance when the mathematician develops the most easy and beautiful strategy, the physicist finds a reasonable solution, the engineer trys lots of parameters and barely reached a solution after a lot of effort. I am sure that in the real life, there are much, but not in the jokes.
To add one more thing, people are easily tricked by appearance without enough detailed understanding. This fire thing is too simple to demonstrate this point.
Well, according to the stereotypes the engineers are practical while the mathematicians are good at abstract thinking. So to let the mathematician win it has to be a dilemma which rewards abstract thinking but penalizes practicality.
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