At this time of year, terrible and/or groan-worthy jokes come to the fore, and are completely acceptable, and in some cases encouraged, provided they’re preceded by a bang noise and read out from a tiny piece of paper.

Rummaging around on my computer today, I found a set of mathematical Christmas cracker jokes I wrote for a party thrown for a group of mathematicians a couple of years ago, where I hacked apart a set of crackers and replaced the toys with tiny slide rules, the paper hats with ones cut into fractal curves along the top, and the existing awful jokes with awful mathematical ones. I thought I’d share them with you all, since they’re more likely to be appreciated by maths fans.

I should add, these were designed to fit the Christmas cracker format of being terrible jokes, and I regret nothing. If you have any Christmas maths jokes of your own, feel free to share them in the comments. Merry Christmas!

At Christmas, how will you perform the inverse operation to exponentiation?
Yule log.

What’s Santa Claus’s favourite graph with no loops?
The Christmas Tree.

What do algebraic geometers study at Christmas?
Holly-nomials.

What’s purple and won’t get much for Christmas?
A finitely presented grape.

Where do all of Santa’s maps go to?
The Ho-Ho-Hodomain.

What do group theorists buy to hang on their doors at Christmas?
Wreath products.

Why does Father Christmas equal minus Christmas Father?
Santa-commutative.

How does Santa solve systems of simultaneous congruences?
Using the Chinese Reindeer Theorem.

Why doesn’t Gödel’s constructible universe exist at Christmas?
Because there’s Nöel.

Why isn’t every man in a red suit with a beard Father Christmas?
Because correlation doesn’t imply Claus-ality.