The comment reminds of a story I heard as a kid where some famous eexperimental physicist wanted to test a new theoretical member of his lab by giving him an extremely complicated shape and asked him to determine the volume.

Several days and derivations later, the theorist reports the volume, after which the experimentalist tosses the shape into a volumetric flask and determines the volume by looking at the difference in flask volume levels. (I am unable to track this story down to its original)