It's not a joke, it's a funny story.

We had dinner last night at a friend's house; it was me, my mom, my mom's friend Lin, Judy and Dan (whose house it was), Dan's son Alex, and Dan's brother Ray. Dan and Alex are both mathematicians, and Judy's a statistician, so I told elemy's epsilon joke. Alex then reciprocated with the following (true) tale:

There was a mathematician who got back the proofs for a mathematical text that he was publishing. He was checking the formulas, and in one of them, he noticed a dot in the middle of the line. He couldn't figure out what it was doing there, so he got out a magnifying glass and looked at it more closely. It turned out that the dot was a little teeny tiny sigma. So he looked back at the manuscript to figure out what was going on, and he saw that, as an addition in the margin, he'd written "where sigma is as small as possible."

In other news, I'm back in Berkeley now, finally. It's sunny. My garden is mostly green. (And other sensible colors, given that there are some flowers.)

From wesleysgirl's request...

( My favorite bits of my own writing. I think. :) )