So someone recently got the bright idea that maybe some of us mathematicians should see each other sometime outside of classes, and organized about a dozen of us to come to his house for dinner. It was good fun (though the food was pretty poor), and afterwards we were all hanging around talking about random stuff, and the conversation turned to bad lecturers and/or bad goofs professors make in lecture. Someone told how one of his lecturers had said, "Any manifold can be embedded in R^n for sufficiently large R," upon which all but one of us burst out in uproarious laughter. The one who didn't was a lone history major who had somehow slipped in; he was less than amused. In fact, he had been lost throughout much of the dinner, for as happens with any large gathering of mathematicians, the topic of conversation always returns to math. He tried to make up for this by doing the same thing with regard to Cold War naval history, which didn't always fly so well. But I did envy how he could explain his field to non-specialists in five words.

I don't think this anecdote has any particular point. Maybe it's that I was reminded that mathematicians can in fact be entertaining, even without alcohol.