A hot air balloon is blown off course by strong winds. It descends to circa 25 feet off the ground and the operator calls down to an individual. The man on the ground replies The balloon operator call down & says Man on ground Man in balloon BTW: I am a mathematician who was a member of of a DOD Think Tank after WW2 which was planning for WW3, which fortunately has yet to occur.
One night, an engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician each wake up to find that their respective trash cans have caught fire. The engineer runs to the bathroom, fills a bucket with water, and throws it on the fire; the fire is extinguished, and he goes back to bed. The physicist runs to her desk, grabs a thermometer and meter stick, takes a few measurements, does a calculation, then carefully measures out a quantity of water and pours it on the fire; the fire goes out as the last few drops fall from the measuring cup, and she goes back to bed. The mathematician sees the fire, runs to the bathroom, turns on the faucet, smiles, says "A solution exists," and goes back to bed.
A mathematician sitting on a bustop bench sees one person enter a bar, and then a few minutes later, two people exiting the bar. "There" he says, "now if just one more person enters the bar, it would contain zero people again."
The version of this I heard went like this: A group of people were in a helicopter tour of Seattle when a thick low fog rolled in. The helicoptor's navigational system was not working and it was running out of gas, but the pilot could not see where to land through the fog. Suddenly he spotted a tall building poking through the clouds. He flew over and saw people working in the offices. He flew close to one, scribbled something on a pad of paper, and showed it to the people in the building. A man in the building wrote something on a piece of paper and showed it to the pilot. The pilot nodded, waved, and flew directly to his landing spot. After they had landed safely, the passengers came up to the pilot to thank him for the safe landing. They asked him what he wrote to the people in the building. He said that he wrote, "Where am I?". The man in the building wrote back, "You are in a helicopter.". The passengers, looking puzzled, then asked, "But how did that help you?". The pilot replied that he realized that the building had to be on the Microsoft campus because the engineer inside had given him an answer that was technically correct, but completely useless.
