re: #286 kirkspencer

Interesting. The version of the “spherical cows” joke I vaguely remember had the physicists assuming a spherical cow.

In a way this makes sense, since mathematicians don’t need to make assumptions about anything as real-world and grubby as a cow.

E.g., the possibly apocryphal story about a mathematics textbook with “Let X be a separable Banach space.” as its first sentence.