Sometimes equations get in the way

I was having a drink the other night with a mathematician and we where discussing the many differences between physics people and maths people, and for me, this is probably one of the better examples. I go into a shop with my friend the mathematician, he tries to place his order.

See if you can figure out what this is (answer at the bottom)...

Mathematician says (this is nicked straight from Wiki)...

In geometry, a torus (pl. tori) is a surface of revolution generated by revolving a circle in three dimensional space about an axis coplanar with the circle. In most contexts it is assumed that the axis does not touch the circle - in this case the surface has a ring shape and is called a ring torus or simply torus if the ring shape is implicit.


A torus can be defined parametrically by:

where

u,v are in the interval [0, 2π),

R (or A) is the distance from the center of the tube to the center of the torus,

r (or a) is the radius of the tube.

R and r are also known as the "major radius" and "minor radius", respectively. The ratio of the two is known as the "aspect ratio".

He goes further...

An implicit equation in Cartesian coordinates for a torus radially symmetric about the z- axis is

or the solution of , where

Algebraically eliminating the square root gives a quartic equation,

The three different classes of standard tori correspond to the three possible relative sizes of r and R. When R > r, the surface will be the familiar ring torus.

At this point the physicist steps up and says

"Give me one of those..."

a personal favorite

strictly speaking we were describing on of these,

A torus, bit like a doughnut if you ask me

but you get the idea. Now my friend argues that his definition can be understood by everyone who understands the language of mathematics anywhere in the universe.

I argue that the language required may be so complex that it can blind people to what we are actually trying to get across.

At this time I think that sometimes, just sometimes we have to much of the mathematician in physics when what we really need is a physicist.  Nice doughnut by the way.