Mathematics: Mathematics and the Calculus of Humour  

By JUGULAR VEIN/JUG SURAIYA  

Mathematics: Mathematics and the Calculus of Humour  

The mathematics of humour, or the humour of mathematics? You're kidding. They're as different as chalk and cheese. Or are they?

We're familiar with those witty mathematical puzzles which delight children of all ages. We speak of a comedian's sense of 'timing', a term suggestive of arithmetical calibration. We talk of jokes that 'click', like tumblers falling into place in a numerical combination lock.

Like mathematics, humour is a blueprint for an alternative reality. The world of our senses - the curve of the horizon, the rising and setting of sun and moon, the flexion of a blade of grass - can be replicated in purely mathematical terms. If you had never seen a sphere in your life, a mathematician could by a series of co- ordinates create a perfect globe in your mind. If you had never heard the music of a waterfall, you would be able to 'hear' it by reading mathematical notation. The scent of a rose, the sweetness of honey, are routinely replicated in mathematical formulae. The world deconstructed, and reconstructed as theorem.

A mathematician is a poet, of a world made not of matter but number. In modern science, Newton was the Kalidas among mathematicians. His Principia Mathematica outlined the movement of all bodies, from stars to billiard balls, the dance of the cosmos choreographed in elegant equations.

Then came a Swiss patent clerk and cracked the shortest mathematical dirty joke in millennia: E=MC2. Einstein's hyper-reality imploded Newton's universe. 'Reality' was suddenly not as 'real' as it 'really' seemed. Mathematical science began to echo mysticism. That's not the end of the story. Mathematicians like Godel have suggested that the 'reality' of numbers (2+2=4) is itself suspect, riddled with inexplicable worm-like 'loops' that make a mockery of the firm ground of mathematical certitude we so confidently tread.

All right. So mathematics is a 'funny' business. But how does it relate to humour? I'd say the two spring from a common matrix: they both provide a view of things other than as they seem to be. The world is not the sum of all things but only the sum of all sums, says the mathematician. Don't look now, but you've just made a pun, adds the humorist. Implying that even as the mathematician was playing tricks with numbers, numbers have been playing tricks with him.

The make-believe world of magic is where mathematics and humour meet. In real life, a cat whose head is twisted round will die. In cartoon films, a cat's head can get twisted round and set right simply by the hyper-logic of twisting it round in the opposite direction. The child claps with delight. He knows the cartoon is not 'real'; he cannot go twisting cat's heads with impunity. But the cartoon's surreality appears more logically appealing than 'reality'. After all, why should there be dead cats? Why should there be death? And what to do about it? Turn it the other way round so it goes away?

The magician saws in half the box containing his lady assistant. The child knows the magician is playing a trick on reality. A panel on the box opens, showing not one lady, but two. The child laughs louder. If 'reality' is an 'illusion', the 'illusion' is also an illusion. Like mathematics, humour is a progressive questioning of the 'real'.

The child laughs at the naked emperor attired in his 'new clothes'. The child sees that the snobbery of fashion is an illusion. Suppose a cartoonist added a Grim Reaper walking behind the nude emperor carrying an X-ray showing that the strutting monarch has a terminal disease. The philosopher would laugh, for the addition suggests that not just our clothes, but our mortal bodies too are but a joke. And if after Death came a capering Clown, tongue stuck out? The sage would laugh, because he knows even death to be a joke. Would the mathematician - who intuits that the reductio ad absurdum is 'really' a reductio ad infinitum of an elusive sublimity - join in the chuckle? Perhaps. But then, mathematicians aren't a humorous lot. Or are they?

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More from same author see: JUGULAR VEIN/JUG SURAIYA  

See also: Mathematics, Faith and Belief, Spiritual Guidance, God and Religion, Peace on Earth, Peace of Mind, Love and Happiness, Life and Beyond, Body Mind and Soul)