Three condemned prisoners share a cell. A guard arrives and tells them that one has been pardoned.

“Which is it?” they ask.

“I can’t tell you that,” says the guard. “I can’t tell a prisoner his own fate.”

Prisoner A takes the guard aside. “Look,” he says. “Of the three of us, only one has been pardoned. That means that one of my cellmates is still sure to die. Give me his name. That way you’re not telling me my own fate, and you’re not identifying the pardoned man.”

The guard thinks about this and says, “Prisoner B is sure to die.”

Prisoner A rejoices that his own chance of survival has improved from 1/3 to 1/2. But how is this possible? The guard has given him no new information. Has he?

(In Mathematical Ideas in Biology [1968], J. Maynard Smith writes, “This should be called the Serbelloni problem since it nearly wrecked a conference on theoretical biology at the villa Serbelloni in the summer of 1966.”)

Colin Rose makes mathematical works of art:

Many more at his website.

Suspend a metal coat hanger on a length of string, wrap the ends of the string around your index fingers, and insert your fingers in your ears. Now swing the hanger gently against the edge of table. What do you hear?

If the Earth did move at a tremendous speed, how could we keep a grip on it with our feet? We could walk only very, very slowly; and should find it slipping rapidly under our footsteps. Then, which way is it turning? If we walked in the direction of its tremendous speed, it would push us on terribly rapidly. But if we tried to walk against its revolving–? Either way we should be terribly giddy, and our digestive processes impossible.

— Margaret Missen, The Sun Goes Round the Earth, quoted in Patrick Moore, Can You Speak Venusian?, 1972

Donald Knuth is so revered among computer scientists that they won’t cash his checks.

Knuth offers a standard reward of $2.56 (one “hexadecimal dollar”) to the first finder of each error in his published books. Since 1981 he has written more than $20,000 in checks, but most of the recipients have simply framed them as points of pride.

“There’s one man who lives near Frankfurt who would probably have more than $1,000 if he cashed all the checks I’ve sent him,” Knuth said in an October 2001 lecture. “Even if everybody cashed their checks, it would still be more than worth it to me to know that my books are getting better.”

Somebody had told me of a dealer in gin who, having had his attention roused to the enormous waste of liquor caused by the unsteady hands of drunkards, invented a counter which, through a simple set of contrivances, gathered into a common reservoir all the spillings that previously had run to waste. … It struck me, therefore, on reviewing this case, that the more the people drank, the more they would titubate, by which word it was that I expressed the reeling and stumbling of intoxication. … [T]he more they titubated, the more they would spill; and the more they spilt, the more, it is clear, they did not drink. … Yet, again, if they drank nothing worth speaking of, how could they titubate? Clearly they could not; and, not titubating, they could have had no reason for spilling, in which case they must have drunk the whole–that is, they must have drunk to the whole excess imputed, which doing, they were dead drunk, and must have titubated to extremity, which doing, they must have spilt nearly the whole. … ‘And so round again,’ as my lord the bishop pleasantly expresses it, in secula seculorum.

— Thomas de Quincey, Essays on Philosophical Writers, 1856