"As verbs the difference between sheared and shorn is that sheared is past tense of shear while shorn is past tense of shear."

Thanks, internet, you're very useful.

Holy shit, I did my equivalent of this class over 2 decades ago and I remember this bloody joke.

Whoever wrote that book has got a lot of mileage from it

Edit: oh the screencap is older than a decade lol

Sheep: 🐑

Sheared Sheep: 🐑

That's a fine transformation.

I just checked and every single textbook I own that contains a reference to this transformation uses an image of a sheep. Sadly all of my textbooks are in English. If I had any relevant texts in German or Spanish I doubt that they would makes this connection.

On an less relevant note one of the books introduces the idea of change of basis with a joke about labeling axes and has several different types of ax with corresponding labels attached and I find that to be a much worse joke.

He done shown me shorned sheared sheep!

Hey, it's the only thing I remember from linear algebra! That's the longest living sheep ever.