Two Sweet Quotes

"Does p^2 divide p^3?" (yes)

"How about we write down all the primes and then list all their factors." (really? all of them)

5th Grade Math Humor

I started this quarter in the 700 level algebra class, which was awful. I had no idea what was going on. As it turns out, this is how most people felt about the class. Anyways, I switched into the 600 level algebra class to give me a better background, since they would've assumed I'd seen this stuff before. Before I switched out, however, there was an awesome lecture. First, let me warn you that the mathematics I discuss here is far from accurate.

So we were sitting in class, and he draws a sweet pictures of 6 points on an equilateral triangle: one at each vertex of the triangle, and one at each midpoint of the edges of the triangle. He drew the medians in and inscribed a circle. You can picture it, but if you swore to forget your high school geometry class, you can view it here: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/octonions/fano.gif

His lecture got to the point where he mentioned something like a Tietze Groups, or maybe a Teets Group. Well he mentioned it several more times, and then he went to write it up. Tits. Named after Jacques Tits, it is a derived subgroup of the twisted Chevalley Group ^2F_4(2) (if anybody knows how to write subscripts and superscripts, I'd appreciate you telling me how). What's so special about this Tits Groups? well it's a finite simple group (of Lie-type) of order 17971200, as opposed to a finite simple group of order 2 (http://youtube.com/watch?v=UTby_e4-Rhg).