A Mathematician... "Will first develop a hypothesis supporting the existence of a unique elephant before proceeding with the search as a subordinate operation, collecting all animals found, testing them against the hypothesis and discarding all that don't fit."
Since an elephant is a 3 dimensional object, I would think a Mathematician would take a more topological approach. A Mathematician could try to categorify elephants and then develop a Topological Quantum Field theory (TQFT) that maps the category of elephants to the category of vector spaces, hence avoid the above method of exhaustion. At the same time, the mathematician could try to find a polynomial invariant mapping the class of elephants, up to homeomorphisms, into a space like GLn(C) or SL2(C). A q-holonomic polynomial would be great since it is inherently recursive (i,e,, the jones polynomial for knots). Finally, If he/she is really creative, this mathematician could smoothly embed the said elephant, call the elephant E, into a 3-ball (S^3) and look at the complement, i.e., (S^3 - E) in a 4 manifold. The question would then be, do elephants in general bound the surface of a unique class of 4 manifolds, if not, find the obstruction. Since homeomorphic does not imply diffeomorphic on smooth manifolds, this approach would probably be the most difficult approach. The Simplest (Crude) Approach [L'approche (Brute) la Plus Simple]: Crudely speaking, an elephant can be thought of as a 2-torus (donut with two wholes), which is consistent with many animals. So, even though the homology groups of a 2-torus is known, the groups would not be unique up to elephants. In this case, since the elephant is SO big, compared to other animals, one could choose a metric and triangulate the elephants outer surface, that is to say cut it into triangles, so that the triangulation could be reassembled on to a square or polygon in the 2 dimension plane. Since a metric was used, the area of the elephant could be calculated and compared to other animals. The only other animal with a similar surface area would be whales, but you are not going to mix those up. .....ad nauseam. My 4-manifolds professor always says, once you choose a metric for your space, you are stuck with a giant elephant in the room. Chris... On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 12:06 PM, Jeff Lasman <[email protected]> wrote: > This one isn't really off-topic at all, and is worth a lot of smiles and even > a few LOLs... > > http://www.jumbojoke.com/elephant_hunting_tactics_of_professionals.html > > Jeff > -- > Jeff Lasman > Post Office Box 52200, Riverside, CA 92517 > Our jplists address used on lists is for list email only > Phone +1 909 266-9209, or see: "http://www.nobaloney.net/contactus.html"; > _______________________________________________ > LinuxUsers mailing list > [email protected] > http://socallinux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linuxusers > -- "As we open our newspapers or watch our television screens, we seem to be continually assaulted by the fruits of Mankind's stupidity." -Roger Penrose _______________________________________________ LinuxUsers mailing list [email protected] http://socallinux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linuxusers
