An Australian parachuting club has been told to improve the software it uses to manage jumps, after an accident in which a jumper’s ‘chute hooked on an aircraft’s tailplane.
The incident occurred on September 20th when 16 parachutists attempted a formation jump from a Cessna 208.
According to an Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) report on the incident, “As the first parachutist stepped out the door to assume the most forward (front float) position, their reserve parachute inadvertently deployed.”
Air caught the ‘chute, which dragged the parachutist out of the plane before wrapping around the aircraft’s horizontal stabilizer. The poor parachutist hit his legs hard enough to suffer an injury and was left dangling beneath the Cessna.
https://mathoverflow.net/questions/53122/mathematical-urban-legends
More at the link.Apparently, there was Asst Professor X at a provincial department Y, and he was up for tenure. Professor X's advisor was a famous Japanese mathematician Z at an Ivy League school. Naturally, he was asked for a letter, which he duly sent. The letter said:
X has a very nice body of work, he proved the following interesting theorems, extended such and such results, used such and such techniques... and so on for two pages. The last sentence was: all in all, X is a very good second-rate mathematician.
The committee was mortified, but figured that the rest of the letter was so good, they should call Z, since maybe since English was not his native language... So, call they did, and the phone conversation went about the same as the letter: did this, improved that, ..., all in all a very good second-rate mathematician.
The committee then said: look, we don't understand why you say he is second-rate!!!
to which Z replied: well, I really can't understand why that would be a problem -- after all, you are a third rate department.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1w932vqye0o
"A plane crashed after a 3D-printed part softened and collapsed, causing its engine to lose power, a report has found.It was revealed the part had been installed during a modification to the fuel system and collapsed due to its 3D-printed plastic material softening when exposed to heat from the engine."
I came across this bit of math humor recently.
But I had not seen the math notation of an exponent written to the left of a number instead of the right. I tried to look it up in a search engine but got nothing.
However, I got the answer I was looking for by typing the question into GPT-4.1. It understood what I was referring to, and gave the correct answer.
Sadly, it got the middle part wrong. It's supposed to be 5 to the 10th power, not C(10,5). Oh well, AI is not perfect.
Go slow, and ...whoa!
