Found pun

[simont]

This morning I noticed a sort of ‘natural pun’ between maths and software. I suspect about three people will get it, but I'll say it anyway because it's too good to lose.

The Schröder-Bernstein theorem states that given injections from a set A to a set B and from B to A, you can find a bijection between A and B. There's a well known construction

Comments

[lnr]

I'm not sure I'd consider it a pun, but it did make me smile :)

[simont]

I think I'm going to call the general technique "Bernstein quoting" from now on, and if software people think I'm referring to Dan Bernstein and mathematicians think I'm referring to Felix Bernstein then that's fine because they'll both be right :-)

[lnr]

I approve!

[gerald_duck]

I've been aware for at least two decades of a variety of escaping schemes. There are a lot of subtle and important trade-offs in terms of usefulness to humans, correctness, robustness, compactness, simplicity, etc.

Knowing as I do that this is a tricksy area where care and circumspection are required, it annoys me that so many systems routinely get it wildly wrong.

Which in turn creates a natural pun with Santayana's principle that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.