There is no problem that cannot be cured by math, or at least that's what my 5th grade math teacher from Bayou Portage elementary school, Eraste de Fermat, taught me. Eraste is a descendant of Pierre de Fermat, who we all know as the famous 16th century French mathematician who gave us Fermat's theorem. Fermat's Last Theorem states that no three positive integers a, b, and c satisfy the equation an + bn = cn for any integer value of n greater than two. The cases n = 1 and n = 2 are known to have infinitely many solutions since antiquity.
MIT cosmologist, Max Tegmark, theorizes that everything can be explained by mathematics. The cure for the common cold is nothing more than a math problem. Colors we see are just formulas based on light theory. All matter is made up of particles, which have properties such as charge and spin, but these properties are purely mathematical. And space itself has properties such as dimensions, but is still ultimately a mathematical structure.
So it occurred to me that if everything is mathematics, then so is recruiting, and that by applying math to recruiting I could create an algorithm that would accurately predict the remaining recruits for LSU's class. I wondered if one could combine Fermat's last theorem with the teachings of Tegmark to build a formula. My big problem in creating such a formula is that I don't really know the difference between a sine, a cosine and a tangent and, quite frankly, have never understood why these things were ever taught to me.
Obviously I needed help. Not knowing where to turn I thought of Eraste de Fermat, the genius descendant of Pierre who somehow ended up in Bayou Portage. I had not seen him in 35 years, but found him still living in his cottage on the bayou. He looked the same, but much, much older. His cottage was littered with notes filled with numbers. If he had been looking for an equation to restore youth, he had not found it.
He was on board immediately. The de Fermat family had not created another theorem of note for the last 500 years. This was his chance to make a mark and help relieve the anxiety of the thousands of grown men who obsess daily over what school an 18 year old might choose to attend.
Every theorem needs a premise, Eraste told me, and that is where our project began. Easier said than done. Nothing we put together added up. Eraste went for days without eating or sleeping. I was about to give up when the lightbulb went off in Eratse's head. "We have been looking at it all wrong" Eraste announced. "We cannot assume 18 year olds will act in a predictable and rational way and have been using rational numbers. The formula will only work if we use irrational numbers".
From that developed Fermats theorem of recruiting: The probability of a recruit committing to any one school has an inverse relationship to the number of girlfriends the recruit has, at any one point in space and time. This ratio is directly influenced by the hotness of the recruits mother and the number of times and frequency with which the father posts on message boards. If you take the square root of that, it becomes the denominator. The numerator is always the number of times a recruit has decommitted multiplied by the average number of his daily tweets. Then you divide the quotient by the number of miles a recruit lives from Tiger Stadium, the closer he lives, the greater probability he comes.
Duh me. It was all right before me, but until it got put on paper I just could see it. Men have known for years that when using mathematics to predict the behavior patterns of women, you must use irrational numbers and obtuse angles. While much progress has been made, we are no closer to understanding women than we are to curing the common cold. But could it be that using irrational numbers could be the key to predicting how 18 year old boys act? Using Fermits recruiting theorem we were able to calculate the probabilities of the remaining recruits on LSUs board attending LSU. Time will tell if our math is right:
> 90% - Rashard Lewis, Willie Allen
> 75% - Christmas Giles (not sure how many girlfriends he has), Jamel Cook
> 54% - Haskins, would be higher if he lived closer
50% - Kristian Fulton (when you use the 50% predictor you are like never wrong whichever way they go, its the go to % for recruiting gurus when they have no clue)
< 35 % - Mullen, Nigel Warrior (maybe the best name ever for a football player, certainly up there with Steve Stonebreaker
< 3% - Rashan Gary
< 1% - Anne Hathaway, Jessica Alba, Jessica Biel, Jessica Rabbit (so you're saying there's a chance?)
MIT cosmologist, Max Tegmark, theorizes that everything can be explained by mathematics. The cure for the common cold is nothing more than a math problem. Colors we see are just formulas based on light theory. All matter is made up of particles, which have properties such as charge and spin, but these properties are purely mathematical. And space itself has properties such as dimensions, but is still ultimately a mathematical structure.
So it occurred to me that if everything is mathematics, then so is recruiting, and that by applying math to recruiting I could create an algorithm that would accurately predict the remaining recruits for LSU's class. I wondered if one could combine Fermat's last theorem with the teachings of Tegmark to build a formula. My big problem in creating such a formula is that I don't really know the difference between a sine, a cosine and a tangent and, quite frankly, have never understood why these things were ever taught to me.
Obviously I needed help. Not knowing where to turn I thought of Eraste de Fermat, the genius descendant of Pierre who somehow ended up in Bayou Portage. I had not seen him in 35 years, but found him still living in his cottage on the bayou. He looked the same, but much, much older. His cottage was littered with notes filled with numbers. If he had been looking for an equation to restore youth, he had not found it.
He was on board immediately. The de Fermat family had not created another theorem of note for the last 500 years. This was his chance to make a mark and help relieve the anxiety of the thousands of grown men who obsess daily over what school an 18 year old might choose to attend.
Every theorem needs a premise, Eraste told me, and that is where our project began. Easier said than done. Nothing we put together added up. Eraste went for days without eating or sleeping. I was about to give up when the lightbulb went off in Eratse's head. "We have been looking at it all wrong" Eraste announced. "We cannot assume 18 year olds will act in a predictable and rational way and have been using rational numbers. The formula will only work if we use irrational numbers".
From that developed Fermats theorem of recruiting: The probability of a recruit committing to any one school has an inverse relationship to the number of girlfriends the recruit has, at any one point in space and time. This ratio is directly influenced by the hotness of the recruits mother and the number of times and frequency with which the father posts on message boards. If you take the square root of that, it becomes the denominator. The numerator is always the number of times a recruit has decommitted multiplied by the average number of his daily tweets. Then you divide the quotient by the number of miles a recruit lives from Tiger Stadium, the closer he lives, the greater probability he comes.
Duh me. It was all right before me, but until it got put on paper I just could see it. Men have known for years that when using mathematics to predict the behavior patterns of women, you must use irrational numbers and obtuse angles. While much progress has been made, we are no closer to understanding women than we are to curing the common cold. But could it be that using irrational numbers could be the key to predicting how 18 year old boys act? Using Fermits recruiting theorem we were able to calculate the probabilities of the remaining recruits on LSUs board attending LSU. Time will tell if our math is right:
> 90% - Rashard Lewis, Willie Allen
> 75% - Christmas Giles (not sure how many girlfriends he has), Jamel Cook
> 54% - Haskins, would be higher if he lived closer
50% - Kristian Fulton (when you use the 50% predictor you are like never wrong whichever way they go, its the go to % for recruiting gurus when they have no clue)
< 35 % - Mullen, Nigel Warrior (maybe the best name ever for a football player, certainly up there with Steve Stonebreaker
< 3% - Rashan Gary
< 1% - Anne Hathaway, Jessica Alba, Jessica Biel, Jessica Rabbit (so you're saying there's a chance?)
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