A topologist walks into a cafe: — Can I have a doughnut of coffee, please?
This is a joke written by the Soviet-American mathematician Tanya Khovanova, who lectures in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. It is derived from the more familiar bon mot: a topologist is someone who doesn’t know the difference between a coffee cup and a doughnut.
Khovanova has an impressive history as mathematician having won a gold medal at the 1976 International Mathematical Olympiad in Austria, only the second woman to do so, and in the process helped the Soviet Union to victory.
She went on to work as a mathematician in Russia, Israel and the United States. She is the author of the endlessly intriguing Number Gossip website. But she is probably best known for writing “Tanya Khovanova's Math Blog”, a fascinating collection of problems, anecdotes and jokes that she has been ...
