Liam ([info]heptadecagram) wrote in [info]mathematics,
2005-07-21 18:21:00

Overheard in [info]rbandrews' LiveJournal:

Saw a bumber sticker on the way back home today. It had an equation on it, and the equation was annoyingly wrong.
False version: Marriage = man + woman. False because it means Marriage ≡ man + woman. It would be better to say: Marriage ∋ man + woman, meaning that the set "Marriage" contains an element equal to "man + woman" (but also allows for other elements). More correct is: Marriage ≡ (n-1)∗man + (m-1)∗woman, m,n∈Z+ ∧ m+n≥4.
Translated: Marriage is equivalent to n-1 men and m-1 women, where m and n are both positive integers, and the sum of m and n is at least four. This means that you must have at least two people total, and between zero and infinity (but only integral; no fractional people) men and women.

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  • 27 comments

[info]ronaldraygun

July 21 2005, 22:36:17 UTC 6 years ago

Marriage = a0man + a1woman | a0 + a1 = 2, ai ∈ {0,1,2}

Marriage is a linear combination of men and women with the given constraint.

[info]chrisamaphone

July 21 2005, 22:46:46 UTC 6 years ago

The original post allowed for more than two people to a marriage, though.

[info]ronaldraygun

July 22 2005, 05:04:13 UTC 6 years ago

Perhaps I disagree with the original poster's definition of marriage.

[info]chrisamaphone

July 22 2005, 18:11:44 UTC 6 years ago

Ah. That's fine then. So do I. But I was just trying to be mathematically consistent. :)

[info]noam_rion

July 21 2005, 22:40:27 UTC 6 years ago

*smiles*

[info]polynomial

July 21 2005, 22:42:02 UTC 6 years ago

"It would be better to say..."

No. I'm pretty sure that they just hate homosexuals. Funny post, though :-)

[info]korean_guy_01

July 21 2005, 22:43:30 UTC 6 years ago

This seems more about political ideology rather than having to deal with Math. Hopefully it gets deleted.

[info]heptadecagram

July 21 2005, 23:01:00 UTC 6 years ago

Contact [info]burr86 or [info]agnosticessence for moderation or deletion requests.

[info]korean_guy_01

July 21 2005, 23:08:55 UTC 6 years ago

I'm well aware of the moderators. Just as long as you know the intentions of the guy who posted it, then you would know the heart of the matter has nothing to do with Math. If you want to discuss the mathematics of the post, it would probably bode well for you to delete the last two lines.

[info]heptadecagram

6 years ago

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[info]chrisamaphone

July 21 2005, 22:45:09 UTC 6 years ago

:D
I must link this in my journal.

[info]kaserne

July 21 2005, 23:11:11 UTC 6 years ago

The fact that you took that apart and analyzed makes me extremely happy. :D

[info]roony

July 21 2005, 23:27:27 UTC 6 years ago

Shouldn't the condition instead be "m + n ≤ 4"? Surely the sum cannot exceed 4, otherwise it would allow a marriage consisting of, say, three men and five women (in which case m + n = 10). This violates the verbal condition that "you must have at least two people total."

[info]improvedhuman

July 22 2005, 00:54:47 UTC 6 years ago

This violates the verbal condition that "you must have at least two people total."

No, it doesn't: "at least" means "≥". It's just that the OP included all forms of polygamy.
Otherwise it should have been an "=" sign.

[info]roony

July 22 2005, 10:38:28 UTC 6 years ago

Oh God. That'll learn me to post before going to bed.

But still, does anyone know of a marriage between m > 2 and n > 2 people? Some kind of knot-orgy? If you want the defintion to allow for polygamy, you'd need the constraint that n = 2 if m > 2 and vice versa, no?

[info]improvedhuman

6 years ago

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[info]emarkienna

6 years ago

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[info]heptadecagram

July 22 2005, 02:42:58 UTC 6 years ago

[info]supafrosh, you rock. You so made my day.

[info]noam_rion

July 22 2005, 03:00:53 UTC 6 years ago

*giggles*

Anonymous

July 22 2005, 13:03:16 UTC 6 years ago

Didn't you know? all politically-based disagreements can be reduced to a(?)b where the disagreement is which sign (?) should be.

Math makes it all disturbingly simple.

[info]jmurton626

July 22 2005, 04:57:41 UTC 6 years ago

*claps* Very very very cool.

It seems that defining marriage to be a linear combination of men and women over the set of natural numbers where the sum of the coefficients is greater than or equal to 2 would be simpler, as described by [info]noam_rion here.

(btw: This is my first post to [info]mathematics, so hi everyone! :) )

[info]tldz

July 22 2005, 14:27:16 UTC 6 years ago

The point of the bumpersticker is that marriage, by definition, is preciesly between one man and one woman. That is, whatever else you may think of other arrangements, they are, by definition, not marriage. You may choose to argue that definition, but you cannot merely assert its incorrectness without proving your point. Until the utterly illegal Massachusetts court ruling, the United States was in agreement on the legal definition of marriage. (Note that it is the function of the judiciary to interpret existing law, not to decree that new law be made.) Just go back and look at the fuss over the admission of Utah as a state. And then look at the Senate hearings on Mormon polygamy over a decade after Utah joined the union.

[info]mergle

July 22 2005, 18:20:07 UTC 6 years ago

Until the utterly illegal Massachusetts court ruling, the United States was in agreement on the legal definition of marriage.

False. There are still about five or so states that haven't legally defined marriage as being between a man and a woman (or at least there were before the 2004 elections. Not that they granted marriage licenses to same-sex couples), and some states permit first cousins to marry while others do not. Before Loving vs. Virginia just barely forty years ago, states disagreed on whether or not interracial couples could be married.

(I apologize to the rest of the community for talking about something that's not math.)

[info]vokzal

July 22 2005, 17:36:52 UTC 6 years ago

Hilarious pedantics. Whatever your politics.

Fractional people... Hee hee.
.8(girl) + .4(boy)=> 1.2(children)

[info]mergle

July 22 2005, 18:33:58 UTC 6 years ago

What I want to know is, does the existence of widows mean marriage includes sets of one person?

I think it's a bit more natural to define marriage in terms of the "is spouse of" relation. This would also provide a more universal definition of marriage; as noted in other posts, it is currently quite context-specific (which country or state if you're going legal, which religion, denomination, or congregation if you're going religious, etc. With this extended, more natural definition, perhaps we could make more significant progress on some of the more important open questions of the field, including the famous "married people live longer" conjecture, and the Fundamental Theorem of Finitely Generated Arguments over The Engagement Ring.

[info]infinitedomain

July 25 2005, 01:29:32 UTC 6 years ago

Dude, I'm stealing this. Is it ok if I show it to my intro to proofwriting professor. I'll give you full attribution.

[info]infinitedomain

July 25 2005, 01:31:12 UTC 6 years ago

Oh, now I notice it's not yours. Guess I'll have to ask [info]rbandrews himself, eh?
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