Cambridge mathematicians not yet wasting time completely
September 7th, 2007 by WaltI came across this weird story by Ben Goldacre at a site called Bad Science. The Daily Telegraph (a British newspaper) printed a story that claimed that a team of Cambridge mathematicians had shown that actress Jessica Alba had the sexiest walk. The simplest explanation would be that a Telegraph reporter was hanging out at a bar frequented by Cambridge mathematicians who announced, five pints into the evening, that the sexiness of Alba’s walk was objective fact.
The actual story is much more bizarre. A PR firm, as a small piece of a larger marketing strategy, wanted to produce scientific-sounding research that proved that curvier women were sexier than skinny women. They hunted around for someone who would produce the desired result, apparently without much success. They did find a single Cambridge mathematician to analyze survey data for them. When that didn’t result in the correct answer, they simply made up the result they wanted and reported that in a press release. A press release that the Telegraph reported as fact.
If you had that kind of power to feed drivel to newspapers and get it printed, why would you waste it on something as banal as Jessica Alba, sex symbol? Why not Wallace Shawn, sex symbol? Why not: Cambridge mathematicians discover that thanks to years of children not brushing their teeth three times a day, the world is going to end next Tuesday? It’s time that public relations stop being about the money, and start being about the artistry.
September 8th, 2007 at 5:48 am
I suspect that mathematicians don’t realize we have that kind of power.
Also, somehow it seems wrong to use “mathematics” in the service of this sort of lunacy.
September 8th, 2007 at 7:44 am
I’ve heard of things in the physical world being “mathematically proven”. Well, mathematics doesn’t work that way. At some point they took an assumption from the field (I would guess psychology in this instance) and did a bunch of logical/numerical analysis from it and came to a conclusion.
Mathematics can say absolutely nothing about the physical world, it can merely take assumptions and produce logical consequences from them.
September 8th, 2007 at 9:12 am
A good general rule of thumb is that anything using the adverb “mathematically”, as in “it can be shown mathematically that…”, will not be up to the standards of rigor of mathematicians.
I developed this rule of thumb in an inorganic chemistry class I took once. A lot of inorganic molecules are highly symmetrical, and group theory can be used to study them. Whenever the professor said “we can show mathematically that…”, this would be followed by five to ten minutes of computations that he didn’t understand and which rarely made sense either from a mathematical or from a chemical point of view.
September 8th, 2007 at 10:23 am
Dear PR People,
If you have a supply of high resolution imagery of acting talent, such as Jessica Alba and Angelina Jolie, available for close scrutiny, I’ll find any correlation you want between any sets of features that will help to promote your products. You’ll find that my consultancy rates are competitive and that my mathematical credentials will lend a degree of authority to your promotional literature that will significantly boost sales.
Thank you,
sigfpe
September 10th, 2007 at 10:48 am
They must have just seen the movie Aviator where Howard Hughes makes his poor meteorologist prove mathematically to the decency committee that his latest movie doesn’t display more cleavage than other movies approved recently.