It Has Not Escaped Our Notice #39

Following thirty years of work by mathematicians at the University of Southern Neasden and the Max Planck Institute for Extracting Sunshine from Cucumbers, it’s been found that mathematics will start to disappear around July, 2014.

At first only very arcane spheres of activity inhabited only by mathematicians will start to erode away, such that by August of next year no exact solutions will be possible in hypertransfinite hermeneutic manifolds, Quiller-Couch algebra, or Trellis transforms involving 27 dimensions or higher.

By around August, 2016, however, Wiles’ proof of the Taniyama–Shimura conjecture for semistable elliptic curves will no longer hold, rendering his proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem untenable. Not long after that, deviations from the exactness of Euler’s formula will become noticeable at the level of one part in a billion.

After that the disappearance of maths will gather more or less exponentially. By 2021 it will no longer matter whether integration or differentiation is used to solve the area under a curve. By 2025, it will be impossible to determine whether the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides for triangles with right angles of values between 80 and 112 degrees. By 2030 nobody will be sure whether 1 + 1 = 2. At that point mathematics will have ceased altogether.

The outlook from the researchers is, while not exactly positive, at least sanguine. “These results will hardly affect the ability of ordinary members of the public to do maths,” says Professor Heinrich Strumpfhosen of the Max Planck Institute, “given that seventy-four out of thirty people already leave high school functionally innumerate.”