We've all seen the articles in Salon and elsewhere. In general, geeks make poor lovers. There's just no way around it, geeks and Sex don't mix. But now the question of the hour is why?
At last, after many years of hopeless searching for dates and phone numbers of the opposite Sex, I believe I may have stumbled upon a theorem that explains why I was always doomed to fail. It stems from basic calculus, and it dictates a strange fact: mathematically, Sex is less than fun. The proof follows.
Actually, I can't make any claims to this being completely original work. About 3 years ago, when I was still in high school and taking my first Calculus class, I heard that a friend of a friend's math teacher had posed a similar (but, as I would later discover, incorrect) proof.
The proof that he had proposed used simple calculus and some clever variable naming to prove that Sex was fun. Alas, if this were only the case, the world would be a much better place. Sadly it is not. When I tried to repeat this proof, I stumbled upon a quite horrifying fact: Sex is in fact less than fun! Well, I can imagine that at this point the reader is becoming quite sceptic. In fact, for many years I was hesitant to believe it myself, until recently.
The other day, I was in the shower marveling over how fantastic my new TI-89 was, and it hit me. It might be possible to use its symbolic manipulation to demonstrate the correctness of my proof. Much to the horror of my roommates, I jumped out of the shower, ran to my desk and immediately began furiously flipping through the 89's manual to see to what extent I might be able to verify my proof.
The TI-89 was not capable of evaluating the entire expression
symbolically, but eventually I arrived at the following code to evaluate my
theorem on the first 42 natural numbers:
The output you ask?
{true true true true true true true true true true true true true true true
true true true true true true true true true}
Mathematica couldn't evaluate the expression symbolically as true either.
However, the following Mathematica code also provides verification for
the first 1789 natural numbers for those of you lacking 89's:
F[X_] := E
tst[N_] = Integrate[E^X, {X, 0, N}] < F[U]^N
Table[tst[n], {n, 0, 1788}]
So there you have it. Mathematica and the TI-89 both confirm the fact why oh so many of us go dateless. In more ways than one, some would argue. After all, It's suspected that Newton never got laid, so maybe there's some connection here.
It was brought to my attention a couple years ago that this integral
actually comes out to be greater than zero if the limit a is some odd
imaginary multiple of Pi. (Technically the real part of the result is greater
than zero for all a such that i*k*Pi/2 < a < 3i*k*Pi/2 for
any odd integer k). So it may be that imaginary Sex is, in some cases,
actually greater than fun. Especially if it involves some odd number of real
pies. There are also those who would try to argue that it may be that real Sex
can be greater than fun if it involves an odd number of imaginary pies. These
people are clearly fools, because they are neglecting the fact that the limits
themselves are imaginary as soon as you bring imaginary pies into the mix. In
fact, it's probably best if you leave imaginary pi out of Sex altogether.
After all, real homemade pi is better than imaginary pi any day of the week.
-- Mike Perry <mikepery@needs.to.get.fscked.org>