I’ve always appreciated the below linked nerdy humor, and before I saw it simply and effectively described by xkcd, the idea was nagging at me from the back of my head. Kudos to Randall Munroe, the creator of this webcomic, for so elegantly encompassing the thought that I, and I suspect many other nerds, have silently chuckled, or rather, shook our heads over and arduously pondered, for years.
Now, I’ve long believed that nerds and geeks make the best lovers, that we are kind, compassionate, interesting to talk to (to say the least) and never short on subject matter, and most of all appreciative of those we love, for the love they give back. But loving a nerd or a geek comes with a price, that anyone else around us will have to suffer through our innate insatiable desire to understand everything. And I do mean everything. Including love itself.
For years, I have contemplated romance in this and countless other forums for your perusal (or lack thereof), and I have come up with the same or similar answers as portrayed here. That is, the interminable and inscrutable question mark. A big empty field, a roving blind spot in my mind’s eye. Love, of course, as has been described for generations by philosophers and thinkers far greater than myself, defies logic and explanation. It cannot be constrained in the confines of even the most complex of equations, has more recursion and deeper meaning than the most brilliantly defined Mandelbrot, bucks every attempt at Fourier transformation, and its solution remains more elusive and maddening than the Riemann hypothesis itself.
Little do people know that Newton himself, in attempting to discover the method for eeking out the area under a curve, was only fathering calculus so that he could discern the exact area of the heart-shaped Hallmark card he had received from his sweetheart, so as to know whether or not the reply he was crafting was of sufficient size and splendor to warrant a third date.
But as happens so often in a field of rigorous study of the hard sciences, the answer does not come when you’re pondering it seriously, striving restlessly and constantly for the answer. It eludes you like the horizon outpaces the runner, and many have believed that the journey itself, like the runner would say, is worth its own reward. I however, disagree, as I received a flash of inspiration least expected in the afternoon of some random Tuesday, and the answer came to me.
Of course, I chose my blog as the perfect venue for the publishing of my findings, in hopes that the mathematical community can expound upon these principles and use this new finding in all its glory.
It’s so simple an equation really. Her happiness = My happiness. My love and desire for her equals the same in return, and making every effort to make her the happiest woman on the planet, will in turn satiate me in ways I never thought possible. It’s a perfectly balanced equation, and it’s the one I’ve been questing for the better part of my life, like a scientist madly scribbling on a chalkboard in barely discernible characters even to the most shrewd and perspicacious of tenure committees and review boards.
I always thought love was difficult, and yes, there are times when it is. One is never tested during the good times, but only during those that are trying, and love is no different. But the true power to this equation is that it’s not even an equal sign, but a greater than. It’s the only equation in nature where truly the sum is greater than each of its parts, and the excess spills over into the trying times, when the summation just seems to fall short, to fill it up and balance the equation again. And never is there too much, and even when it seems there is, never is there too little. It is a perfectly modulo zero, real domain, non-imaginary sum.
And why shouldn’t love be boiled down into the elegance of mathematics? Maybe it’s insensitive of me, maybe it’s banal or hackneyed, or far too geeky in dry emotionless logic, but if the world really can be this beautifully simple, if our little corner of it can be encapsulated into one tiny yet powerful, discreet mathematical proof, then how can that be something to scoff at? How can the perfection of pure mathematics be incompatible with the perfection of true love?
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