The Mathematician

Once there was a competition held between an engineer, a physicist and mathematician. The competition is that each of them will be placed in a wooden enclosure covered on all sides and the one who gets out quickly is the winner. All of them were put inside the wooden box at the same time and the competition started. The engineer came out in 2 minutes destroying the wooden box. When asked how he came out so quickly, he replied that he kept tapping all along the wooden box to find out where it sounded the weakest and then broke open kicking at that area.

Ten minutes later, the physicist came out opening the box. When asked, he said that he tried shaking the box and he found the spot where the equilibrium was less and he decided that he could break open the box at that spot easily and came out.

Only the mathematician was left and people waited. It was 4 hours; 6 hours and then 8 hours but no sign of the mathematician ever trying to come out. Finally, the judges decided on opening the doors themselves. And when they went in, the mathematician was still pondering on something, having written something on the paper. The paper read, "Assume, I am out of the box..."

Now the IT version, there was this challenge between a developer, a lead and a project manager and as usual the one who solves it quickly is the winner.

The developer solved it quickly, but taking a look at the code and isolating what the problem was. The lead was also on the same line, but he compared different versions of the code to isolate the problem and fix the issue.

And now the manager's turn, he had written... "Assume the problem is fixed, now what do I do...?" :)

So long. until the next post...