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From: weemba@brahms.BERKELEY.EDU (Matthew P. Wiener)
Newsgroups: net.jokes
Subject: Shaggy Dog for Mathematicians Only
Message-ID: <12247@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Sat, 8-Mar-86 02:56:01 EST
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.12247
Posted: Sat Mar  8 02:56:01 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 9-Mar-86 00:12:18 EST
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: weemba@brahms.BERKELEY.EDU (Matthew P. Wiener)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 22

POSSIBLY OFFENSIVE TO FRENCH MATHEMATICIANS:  NOT ROT13ED!!
DEFINITELY OFFENSIVE TO PROGRAMMERS WHO CAN'T GET THE JOKE!
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The following is a Shaggy Dog story.  Both the story and the awful pun at
the end are probably unintelligible unless you have a PhD in mathematics.
So if you don't get it or don't find it funny, that's just TOO bad.
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When Grothendieck was publishing his early papers on K-theory, a colleague
of his was visiting an American university.  He gave several lectures on
the exciting developments on the various K-functors Grothendieck invented.
And this is how K-theory first came to America.

The above is the standard myth, but it is actually untrue.  What actually
happened was that an idiot of a French mathematician happened to be having
lunch with Atiyah, who was also in America at the time.  They were speaking
about mathematics, but each misunderstood the other, because of the language
problem.  All Atiyah remembered of their conversation was the Frenchman's
discussion of how to teach calculus and its applications to problems with
exponentials.  Atiyah, unfortunately, thought he was discussing stable vector
bundles and how to classify them.  Thus was born "Grawth 'n' dee kay theory".

ucbvax!brahms!weemba	Matthew P Wiener/UCB Math Dept/Berkeley CA 94720