Numerators of the Lost Ark

Dear Friends,

Your name is Carmencita Calderón. It is 1930, and you are the dance partner of Cachafáz, the most notorious tango dancer in Buenos Aires. His pock-marked face and slick choreography are legendary, but you do not love him. No, your heart belongs to a man they call El Vasco, another professional tango dancer who left Argentina ten years ago to seek his fortunes in the smoky nightclubs of Paris.

After sending you not so much as a letter for years, your lover returns unexpectedly and sweeps you up in a particularly fiery tango. But Cachafáz is a jealous man. He challenges El Vasco to a high stakes dance-off, to the death. You know this is a battle your love cannot win. You must beg him to flee, flee the country this very night and never return!

This, dear friends, is the story of “El Vasco,” the Hard Taco song for March that will break your heart into mil piezas de dolor, a thousand aching splinters.

Numerators of the Lost Ark

The so-called Golden Ratio, (a+b)/a = a/b, has been used as far back as Euclid to make the world’s most beautifully proportioned rectangles. In his seminal textbook Elements (~300 B.C.), Euclid describes an incident in which King Ptolemy spends a whole Saturday working on a new rectangle and neglects to use the Golden Ratio to choose its proportions. Ptolemy invites Euclid to brunch at the palace to show off the rectangle, and all Euclid can do is smile politely and comment about what a nice personality it has. And you know what’s also nice, Your Highness? (a+b)/a = a/b.

Ratio Profiling

About a thousand years later, Fibonacci unveiled his famous sequence of numbers.

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34…

If just looking at those numbers doesn’t get you all hot and bothered, think about this: the inverse of the ratio of two consecutive elements in the Fibonacci sequence asymptotically approaches the Golden Ratio. (Dim-witted readers may ignore that last sentence with impunity.) This sequence even appears in nature, such as in the fruit sprouts of a pineapple or the flowering of an artichoke. 

Fibonacci himself had little interest in constructing sexier rectangles or more natural-appearing artichokes. His discovery of the sequence was motivated entirely by apprehension about wearing other people’s pants. You see, at a New Year’s party in 1202, one of the Consuls of Pisa spilled some Chianti on Fibonacci’s trousers. The mathematician had been successfully flirting with this Umbrian chambermaid when it happened, so he just borrowed another pair of trousers from his cousin so he wouldn’t have to leave early. When he sobered up the next day, Fibonacci began work on his seminal textbook, Liber Abaci, in which he postulated:

“It is born out that every time you borrow someone else’s pants, you are not just borrowing their pants, but the pants of everyone they’ve ever borrowed pants from.

0 (Leonardo Fibonacci)

1 (My cousin Coluccio)

1 (Coluccio’s peasant girlfriend)

2 (My cousin Bartolino, Coluccio’s girlfriend’s sister whose name I can’t remember)

3 (Mazetto the Algerian philosopher, both Guglielmo brothers)

5 (Bertuccia, young Amerigo , those two skanks from Sardinia, Pope Innocent III)

Etc.

By following this sequence out to thirty or more positions, it is empirically shown that I have become asymptotically close to sharing crotch space with every living person in Italy.

Q.E.D.”

A Math-ive Heart Attack

Nearly a thousand more years have passed, and I have discovered an entirely new application for the Golden Ratio… human relationships. First, you have to know that the ratio is an irrational number, slightly less than 3:2. The theory is as follows: Over the course of a lifetime, everyone can expect to break approximately 2 hearts and have their own heart broken 3 times. Recall that the ratio is more important then the actual numbers. I suspect that if you dwell enough on your own experience with doomed love affairs, you’ll probably agree.

Individuals who deviate from the Golden Ratio in either direction detract from the goodness and balance of the world, either by becoming too bigheaded or too pitiful. 

In a closed system, upholding this 2:3 ratio would be a mathematical impossibility. How can everyone in world receive more heartbreak than they bestow? It works because the population is expanding, and the number of new heartbreaker-eligible individuals exceeds the number of people that retire from the system each year. It’s basically a giant pyramid scheme of unrequited love. The system breaks down in communities that fail to expand continuously, such as China. We all recognize this as a human rights violation, even if we don’t know why. It’s the dearth of new heartbreakers.

With warmest regards,

Zach