Hilarity with Jeremy by Paul B. '11

As you may have already realized, MIT attracts an incredibly diverse range of people, with a similarly broad array of interests, passions, and personalities. When I say that, I’m not just referring to undergraduates, but also to grad students, post-doctorates, and even professors – and in my opinion, this diversity is one of MIT’s greatest strengths. Although I could probably fill an entire entry about the incredible variety of people I’ve met here, right now I want to focus on an aspect of diversity I never fully appreciated until a few days ago – namely, how MIT ends up attracting some very hilarious people.

As Exhibit A of this theory, I’d like to present you with Jeremy. Jeremy is my 18.03 TA, which in English means he’s one of the teaching assistants for my differential equations class. Twice a week, roughly fifteen other students and I meet with him for an hour-long “recitation,” where he clarifies and expands upon some of the concepts we were taught in lecture, presents us with example problems, and helps answer our questions.

Additionally, Jeremy is hilarious. Basically, if you take one part wit, one part inanity, one part nonlinearity, one part awkwardness, three parts math genius, and mix it all together with a goatee, flyaway hair, and double earrings – then you have Jeremy, or at least a rough approximation. His sense of humor doesn’t necessarily help us learn the material, but it does keep our attention. And it makes for a good blog entry.

Last Tuesday, on the first day of classes, Jeremy walked into the recitation room wearing, of all things, an Elmo T-shirt. I’ve seen some pretty funny T-shirts in my time, but somehow (perhaps because of sheer incongruity) that just took the cake. As Jeremy himself said, “You wear your best clothes on the first day of class.” Upon hearing this, I instantly recognized Jeremy as the source of all wisdom and wit in human form, and commenced to scribble down the most hilarious of his sayings, for future chuckles and blogging. While I’m sure I’ll have more Jeremy-isms later in the term, I couldn’t help myself from sharing some of the best ones with you right now.

“18.03 is this class. 18 means math, 03 means…this class. Yeah.”

“This is my email address. Help, guidance…moral support.”

“If I wait a million years I’m not going to have very much junk.”

“This is all guesses, all estimates – if you like we can put the squiggle-squiggle.” (replaces an equals sign with an approximately sign)

(greeting a latecomer) “Hey! How’s it going! I’m Jeremy. Just FYI.”

(talking about the Elmo shirt again) “My nephew got me this shirt. It matches his. We look adorable together. He just turned three.”

“If this were Hooke’s Law we’d get the wrong answer.”

“…now we go back to knowing zero things.”

“Deltas are bad.”

“This is detestable, I would say.” (after I suggest separating the variables to solve a problem. Needless to say, I was somewhat taken aback.) “We can do it the hokey way, though…” (starts writing on the board) “I hate this…” (someone abruptly and loudly leaves recitation) “Apparently she hates it too. We’ll miss you!”

“This is just silliness.”

“We’ll put it in lightly. We’ll put it in pink, if you like.” (upon adding an absolute value sign to the natural logarithm function)

“Somehow I wrote the wrong thing, and the wrong thing turned out to be better…whatever, right?”

“This feels better though, does it not?”

“Here I’m just using magic and rabbits out of hats.”

“Okay. New game. wildebeests. In Africa. I like Africa.”

(after some dispute about which African countries have indigenous wildebeests) “Okay, we’re in Kenya, smartypants. I don’t know any American geography either, so it’s okay.”

“The wildebeests like to procreate, because what else is there to do besides eat?”

“…also running into electric fences and stuff.” (talking about what causes the wildebeests’ death rate)

“I’m going to put this delta t over here so we don’t get confused. By we I mean me.”

(analyzing the solution) “Actually this does make sense. It doesn’t make sense for other reasons, but that’s a problem with the system.”

“Hi!” *awkward silence* (first words on the second day of recitation)

“It’s possible that the thing you want to call something else is actually a different object.”

“Don’t worry, it will get harder.”

(soliciting answers to a question) “I hear one, I hear none. Do I hear four? Let’s just get them all on the table.”

“So we have about thirty seconds, I want to point something out.” (several minutes of math follow)

“I think it’s fun. We’re solving differential equations without actually doing arithmetic, or calculus, or whatever you want to call it. Should we do another!?”

And that, my friends, is Jeremy. For even more hilarity with 18.03 and other classes (including quotes from the legendary Professor Arthur Mattuck), do yourself a favor and check out these additional links. Be forewarned: just a black hole, these quotes will suck you in…but I mean that in a good way. It’s all in the name of education, right? After all, if your parents ask you why you’re spending so much time on the Internet, you can just tell them you’re studying MIT professors. You’d almost be right. ;)

Keri’s collection of quotes
a link I stole from Keri
another link I stole from Keri (good thing I’m attributing my sources!)
a random page I found myself
another random page
Mollie’s entry about quotes
Mollie’s quote archive