Who Says Breast Related Math Can’t be Fun

Well, a certain kind of fun, for a certain type of person, namely those obsessed with tits…

More important equation news from the Sun this week, with the exciting headline “How to tell if the boobline is too low … use this equation 0=NP(20C+B)/75“. Alongside a photograph of poor old Britney Spears with her boobs falling out.

“Following her wardrobe malfunction – where she was snapped nearly popping out of a very low-cut dress at her 27th birthday bash – scientists, undies experts and mathematicians have been trying to figure out where the decency perimeter lies. And here we can exclusively reveal the formula to work it out.”

I will talk you through this important work. “To figure out the naughtiness rating (O), you times the number of nipples exposed, from zero to two or expressed as fractions of nipple shown (N) with the percentage of exposed frontal surface area (P).” We’ll stop there.

This is, of course, part of a crap effort to sell a presumably crap book by an apparently crap mathematician who I shall not name¹, partly in protest at the crass way he makes a big fuss about doing maths at Cambridge (congratulations), and partly because it seems to me that he can’t do basic arithmetic.

“Britney’s tight fitting Roberto Cavalli dress showed off around 70% of her breasts,” said the Sun: “and experts at Wonderbra think she is a 32D. Without any nipple exposure, Britney’s formula works out as 0x70x(20×5+32)/75 = 123.2.”

No. Without nipple exposure Britney’s score is zero, because zero multiplied by anything is zero. In fact, even if that error wasn’t made by our genius mathematician (did you know he did maths at Cambridge?) the formula is still rubbish, because if all women walked around wearing absolutely nothing but tassles on their nipples they would still have a naughtiness rating of zero.

[Click to continue reading Bad Science: How the Sun boobed over Britney Spears equation – The Guardian ]

I suppose I should link to the boobage in question – of such luminaries as Beyonce, Courtney Love, Nigella Lawson, Anne Hathaway, Salma Hayek, Rihanna, et al.

Ok, I confess, am just trying to juice up my site traffic with some plump melons.

1. but I will: Mathematician William Hartston, who holds an MA in Maths from Cambridge University [↩]