Favorite Joke

An engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician…

An engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician are sleeping in different rooms of a hotel. In the middle of a night a fire breaks out at the end of the hallway. The engineer is the first to awake. He smells smoke and goes into the hallway, seeing the fire. Next to the fire are a dozen buckets full of water. He runs to the buckets and empties six full buckets to put out the fire. With the fire extinguished, he goes back to sleep.

Later in the night, the physicist wakes up, smelling a fire. He goes into the hallway, sees the fire, and also sees a bunch of buckets, half of which are full with water. He reaches for his calculator, figures out the optimal trajectory, and puts out the fire with the throw of just one bucket of water. Satisfied, he goes to bed.

Finally, the mathematician wakes up, also smelling a fire. He enters the hallway and sees a fire and a number of water buckets near it. He does some calculation in his head and then says, “Ah, a solution exists!” and goes back to sleep.

(A fun variation of the last paragraph is that after seeing the fire, the mathematician sees the physicist, thereby reducing the problem to one that has been solved already.)