Saturday, January 14, 2006

Dr. Math #1: Girls = Evil

Okay, everybody's seen the proof of why girls are evil. But, in the interest of practicing mathematical proofs written in English, I'm going to go into more detail on why this is true-or, to be more accurate, why all good girls are evil. The proof creates a restriction that it doesn't necessarily prove or disprove that bad girls are evil, but it's a conclusion that cannot be drawn from the proof. To begin, I'll state some axioms (statements assumed to be true), and a lemma, a statement too insignificant to be a fully-fledged theorem, but is required to be true for proofs that refer to it, and thus need to be proven itself.

Axiom 1: Positive values are considered good, whilst negative values are considered bad.
Axiom 2: Good will take on two meanings. The first meaning, which will be used in this article unless otherwise specified, is the opposite of bad. The second meaning is the opposite of evil.
Axiom 3: Bad and evil are not the same concepts. To be bad is to cause disruption in society, but to be evil is to seek personal gratification by means of being bad.
Axiom 4: Girls and women can be used interchangably.

Lemma 1: good -> not(evil) is false
Proof: To prove a statement false, all that is required is to show one true example which contradicts the statement. I propose to you Batman. He was certainly a good superhero, but in many ways he was also evil. Batman sought vengeance for his parents, and though it was the bad guys that killed his parents it was still a very evil act to do it in much the way Batman did (but alas, it was what made Batman so great but that's not my point). Lemma 1 proven.

Okay, now to get on with the proof. We begin with the common statement "women are time and money." Breaking this down into the logical portions, we get "women = time * money". Note that "and" can mean either addition or multiplication. In this case, multiplication is assumed because "time" and "money" have different units and cannot be added.

Now, where does one get money? Through a job. Most jobs are paid a rate based on the amount of time worked, thus time is directly proportional to money, or "time = k * money" for some constant k based on how big your paycheck is. Therefore, from "women = time * money" is equivalent to "women = k * money^2".

Returning to axiom 3, to be evil is to achieve goals by any means of being bad. Throughout history, it has proven time and time again that the common goal of evility is power, and power means money or, more accurately, money is the root of all evil. Thus "money = sqrt(evil)" or "money^2 = evil". Hence "women = k * money^2" becomes "women = k * evil" or "women are directly proportional to evil and how much money you make" and our proof is done.

To close, an interesting restriction was created based on socialogical assumptions during the proof. In order for money to be the square root of evil within the realm of reality, it requires that evil be non-negative (note that this isn't a contradiction, see lemma 1). Therefore, since evil must be a zero or positive value, and assuming you get paid at your job (thus you don't pay your employer) and the proportionality constant is either zero (you don't have a job) or positive, women must also be zero or positive. This creates two results: if you don't have a job, women are zero and you don't get one, or women must be positve or good. The latter case creates the final conclusion that "good girls are evil."

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