I was going through a pile of papers today and found some old correspondence with the Mathematical Association of America.
In 2004 I purchased from them a copy of Robert M. Young’s wonderful book Excursions in Calculus. I paid by credit card on the web site, I think, or else by phone. Anyway, the point is I paid in advance. The book arrived soon after, and then a while after that I got a bill. Why they sent the bill, I don’t know, since I’d already paid. Which they obviously knew, too, since the bill was for $0.00:
Maybe they meant it to be a receipt or something?
Anyway, I did what any red-blooded hacker would do when sent a bill for zero dollars by Mathematical Association of America: I paid it…
…by check:
Oh, how I wanted them to deposit it! But they didn’t even try; they sent the check back uncashed. Maybe the MAA is using one of those accounts-receivable clearinghouse services, and it isn’t really their fault. But if you can’t write a check for eiπ + 1 to the Mathematical Association of America, whom can you write one to?
The handwritten reason for the rejection was totally lame, too: “check needs to be wrote out in US dollars” [sic]. But it was in U.S. dollars! Sheesh, it’s like they’d never seen a π-dollar bill before or something.
Ah, it pains me… such brilliance, wasted on the illiterate and innumerate. The MAA are lions lead by asses.
What a fine use for check number 1729!
Sounds like just the sort of thing that the author of these comics would do.
Fitz,
Glad you noticed! ๐ You can imagine how pleased I was that that was where my checkbook happened to be when the bill came…
Eric,
Amen! I’m a huge xkcd fan too.
Lev,
Do you know something more about the MAA? Except for this purchase, I don’t really know much about them. They kept sending me letters for a long time, addressed to “Professor Karl Fogel”, asking me to join.
Why is your email on your check using the one\half sign? Did they not have a “@”?
You could start with their website (http://www.maa.org/)
I also remember many MANY years ago, when I was in high school, they sponsored a competition (where I was the winner in my HS — still have the lapel pin somewhere).
They do good work.
I guess you need the trivial solution too, its a funny idea but could you expect a human being to be responsible to calculate and maybe make an _error_ while doing so? ๐
it’s the summum of capitalism when you can pay with flesh or imaginary numbers for years of hard work and study.
1729 seems like a rather dull number to me.
Sam asks:
Answer: to fool the spam address harvesters, of course! ๐
Re: XKCD
Yes, in fact.
http://xkcd.com/verizon/
1729 is actually an interesting number – Ramanujan liked it. It is the smallest that can be expressed as two sums of two different cubes: 1^3+12^3=9^3+10^3=1729
Eman,
Oh, we know, see the above comments :-).
You know you had some poor office girl totally confused with your check and she struggled to come up with even that solution to your payment.
Tracy,
You’re probably right. Sigh :-).
Why does it have to be an office GIRL who is confused? The statistics say that more women go to college than men…
@Sara
Good point, and thanks for making it!
Seems this has been posted as a “win” on failblog:
http://wins.failblog.org/2011/04/03/epic-win-photos-cheque-amount-win/
Actually, it might qualify as both a win and a fail!
I saw this and a similar check (the one to Verizon) many years ago. It has once again served its purpose in proving that I’m a dork….but it warms my mathematical heart and reminds me of how much I love math. Thanks, Karl! ๐
Maybe you should have written it with ‘j’ instead of ‘i’. The reader might have been an EE.
Phil,
Hah! But — confession — I’m not an EE and didn’t get that at first, so I had to look it up. For the benefit of any others in the same situation: https://www.quora.com/Why-in-electrical-engineering-and-allied-fields-is-the-imaginary-unit-denoted-by-the-letter-j-as-opposed-to-i