Your Mom
Your Mom is a conceit with currency among some circles at Williams. It is probably a derivative of the "Yo Momma"/"Your Mom" jokes that were popular in grade school. It is invariably used with irony. "Your mom" can be used as an unthinking answer to a question or a quick and easy riposte. E.g.,
"I'm going to the baseball game, wanna come?" "Your mom wants to come."
Your mom reached her peak popularity in 2002-2003, when more than a handful of seniors gave Math colloquia with "Your Mom" in the title. The complete list is:
- "Blowing Up Cubes: Making Your Mom Proud" (Satyan Devadoss, professor)
- "An Examination of Outcome Sensitivity to Deception in a Case-Control Study of Second-Hand Smoking or What to Do If Your Mom Lies about Smoking" (Michael Baoicchi '03)
- "The 15 Puzzle: How to Stump Your Mom" (Tracy Borawski '03)
- "Backwards Induction Is Not Robust or Why You Can't Always Trust Your Mom in a Truel" (Adam Cole '03)
- "Analyzing Dichotomous Dependent Variables Using Logistic Regression, or How to Predict Absolutely Anything about Your Mom" (Jennifer Doleac '03)
- "Throwing Darts with Your Mom, or, Is the Continuum Hypothesis False?" (Williams Edgar '03)
- "AES: The Best Way to Hide your Internet Movie Collection from Your Mom" (Robert Gonzalez '03)
- "The Game of “Guess It†or How to Bluff Your Mom Out of 30 Grand" (Thomas Hodgson '03)
- "HOMFLY and Your Mom: Polynomials and Braids" (Brian Katz '03)
- "The Banach-Tarski Paradox, or How to Turn Your Mom into a Turkey" (Daniel Klasik "03)
- "On Voting Coalitions and Power Indices. Should Your Mom Be a Politician?" (Edvard Major '03)
- "The Continuous Wavelet Transform: Wavelets and Your Mom, or, rather, Their Mom" (Mark Rothlisberger '™03)
- "Can You Prove the Existence of Your Mom without Offering a Construction? Algebraic Curves, Invariants, and Hilbert's Finite Basis" (Eric Schoenfeld '03)