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    The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus: The Mathematics of Christmas
    The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus: The Mathematics of Christmas
    The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus: The Mathematics of Christmas
    Ebook233 pages1 hour

    The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus: The Mathematics of Christmas

    By Hannah Fry and Thomas Oléron Evans

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    About this ebook

    Two merry mathematicians explore the geometry of gift-wrapping, board game theory, and much more in this hilarious holiday treat.

    How do you apply game theory to select who should be on your Christmas shopping list? What equations should you use to decorate the Christmas tree? Will calculations show Santa is getting steadily thinner—shimmying up and down chimneys for a whole night—or fatter—as he munches on cookies and milk in billions of houses across the world?

    In The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus, distinguished mathematicians Hannah Fry and Thomas Oléron Evans demonstrate, with eminently readable clarity, how applied mathematics are so thoroughly interwoven throughout our everyday lives by explaining mathematical concepts through one very merry motif: Christmas. In their quest to provide mathematical proof for the existence of Santa, the authors take readers on a festive journey through a traditional holiday season, wherein every activity, from wrapping presents to playing board games to cooking the perfect turkey, is painstakingly and hilariously analyzed. Because who hasn’t always wondered how to set up a mathematically perfect Secret Santa?

    Lighthearted and diverting with Christmasy diagrams, sketches and graphs, equations, Markov chains, and matrices, The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus brightens up the bleak midwinter with a stockingful of mathematical marvels.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateOct 24, 2017
    ISBN9781468316131
    The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus: The Mathematics of Christmas
    Author

    Hannah Fry

    Dr. Hannah Fry is a mathematician and complexity scientist from University College London’s Center for Advanced Spatial Analysis. Fry also regularly presents the Number Hub strand of BBC Worldwide’s YouTube channel, Headsqueeze. Her first TED talk attracted more than 500,000 views across all TED channels and evolved into her first book, The Mathematics of Love.

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      Book preview

      The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus - Hannah Fry

      INTRODUCTION

      I wish it could be Christmas every day

      The nights are drawing in, the crisp winter air is filled with the inviting smells of roasted chestnuts and hot apple cider, and children everywhere are struggling to contain their excitement about Santa’s imminent arrival. It can only be Christmas—the most magical time of the year.

      True, your overdraft is straining under the weight of your generosity, you’re obliged to spend hours writing heartfelt festive wishes to close friends that you’ve accidentally forgotten about for the rest of the year, and your daily alcohol consumption barely ever dips below the recommended weekly limit, but you wouldn’t have it any other way.

      With so much goodwill everywhere, it’s no wonder you might wish it could be Christmas every day.

      But let’s ponder that for a moment and run the numbers. What would it be like if we decided, as a nation, to move towards a System for Christmas Repeating Every day At Midnight (SCREAM for short)?

      One big winner of SCREAM would be the world’s largest Christmas store, Bronner’s in Michigan, who would see a substantial increase in stock turnover. Since we all normally keep our decorations up for around a month, we’d have to replenish our glass ornaments 12 times as frequently as we do now. That means Bronner’s, who currently sell around 600,000 of them a year* could expect a whopping 7.2 million festive ornaments to pass through their registers annually.

      Of course, all those ornaments would be useless without a steady supply of Christmas trees to dangle them on. Currently, the US buys 40 million trees a year, compared to 8 million in the UK and 42 million in the rest of Europe.† Since each tree needs seven years to grow from a sapling before it’s worthy of becoming the dazzling centerpiece of your family home, switching to SCREAM could result in a shortfall that would take some years to rectify.

      However, given that there are 350 million fir trees being grown on Christmas tree farms in North America alone, if we ration ourselves to one new tree a month we’ll be OK until at least May or so.

      After that, we can utilize some of the other 3.04 trillion trees around the world‡ while we’re waiting for the fir farms to replenish. True, it might not have that pine-fresh smell, but if you hack up a willow and slap a bit of garland on it, it should do for a few years. But choose your tree wisely. A 400-foot redwood poking out of your living-room window probably won’t go down too well with the HOA.

      The daily festive feast could cause even more upheaval. Each year the American public buys and eats 22 million turkeys for our Christmas dinners.* From hatching to table, turkeys live for 6 months, so around 4 billion turkeys would need rearing and housing at any one time to meet the SCREAM demand.

      The University of New Hampshire† suggests each turkey should have at least 6 ft² of covered shelter. That translates into a giant turkey coop of around 860 square miles, roughly the size of Jacksonville, Florida.

      As self respecting animal lovers, we’re certain most supporters of SCREAM would insist on all turkeys being free-range, which means we’d also need to factor in 100 ft² of pasture for each bird. This translates into a colossal turkey farm of 15,300 square miles that would cover all of Maryland, Washington D.C., and a good chunk of Virginia. A majestic holding that would no doubt be the envy of the world.

      Sure, it would mean losing the nation’s capital, financial and cultural institutions, and over 250 years of history, but think how much joy and Christmas cheer we’d stand to gain. Overall, it’s a small sacrifice to make.

      The benefits don’t stop there either. Those turkeys are going to generate a lot of poo: 18 billion pounds a year, in fact.* As you might expect, this brown gold serves as an excellent fertilizer, but more impressively it can also be used to fuel power stations. Under SCREAM, then, all our energy concerns will be sorted and the flowers in the White House Rose Garden will flourish (though the resident turkeys may not appreciate them as much as the humans once did).

      Of course, we could scatter the turkey farms around the country, using buildings we no longer have a need for, like schools, stadiums, and shopping centers.

      We’ll want to keep the hospitals, though. If we’re all eating the Christmas average of 6,000 calories a day—3,500 calories more than any of us need— we’ll each have put on around 100 lbs by the end of March.† The increased prevalence of obesity might make our hospitals busy, but it’s great news for the manufacturers of reinforced wider beds and yoga pants.

      SCREAM won’t necessarily be stress-free for everyone. Santa may well go into meltdown after a matter of months. But think how great it will be for the children who wake up to find a stocking full of presents every single morning.

      Granted, our GDP might slip a bit if almost everyone stopped going to work. There’s also the small matter of having nowhere to shop for the presents, 1.8 billion turkeys running amok, and a generation of children growing up with no work ethic or sense of discipline. But let’s not get bogged down by trivialities like that.

      All in all, we can see hardly any convincing arguments against SCREAM. Unfortunately, the experts of the nation are not to be persuaded. We’re stuck with Christmas as an annual event, and we’re going to have to make the best of it.

      So, to really extract every possible ounce of fun and joy from the day, there’s only one sensible way to plan your festivities: using mathematics.

      How else but with mathematics could you work out how to time cooking your Christmas turkey to perfection? Or determine the best way to wrap your presents? Or design a flawless Secret Santa system? Or guarantee you beat your family in the annual board-game argument?

      Some people might try to accuse us of taking the magic out of Christmas by reducing it to a set of mathematical equations, but for us the exact opposite is true.

      We believe that mathematics is so powerful that it has the potential to offer a new way of looking at anything—even something as warm and wonderful as Christmas. Math can uncover hidden patterns behind the familiar festivities and provide unique insights into how to really get the most out of your traditional celebrations. All of which, we think, adds up to make this time of year even more magical.

      We hope to persuade you by showing you how to use mathematics to dress your tree with flawless precision. We’ll give you statistics to help you beat your family at the traditional annual Christmas board game. We’ll even offer ultimate proof, if ever it were needed, of Santa Claus’s existence.

      So curl up in front of the fire, pour yourself a large glass of hot cider, put Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas Is You on repeat, and enjoy the merriest mathematics of Christmas.

      CHAPTER 1

      The indisputable existence of Santa Claus

      It is astonishing that some people still doubt the existence of Santa Claus. Despite the vast amount of photographic evidence, the hundreds of annual reports on Father Christmas’s activities from perfectly reputable news sources, and the bulging stockings full of presents that reliably appear on Christmas morning, somehow the doubters remain unconvinced.

      Thankfully mathematics can help.

      The conspiracy theorists have already tried turning to science to demonstrate their (clearly incorrect) position. They calculate that if Santa were to visit the 1.9 billion children in the world,* he would have to travel at 3,000 times the speed of sound while carrying more than 300,000 tons of presents† (about the weight of six Titanics). Richard Dawkins, king of the skeptics, has insisted that the lack of any noticeable sonic booms from all that zipping about at supersonic speeds is more than enough evidence that Santa cannot possibly be real.‡

      Worse still, some claim that this astonishing weight of parcels travelling at such a remarkable speed would practically vaporize the leading reindeer, who would have to withstand the full hit of air resistance. Meanwhile, sitting in the back of his sleigh, Santa would be subjected to forces tens of thousands of times stronger than gravity, making it impossible for him to breathe or to retain any of the physical structure of his bones or internal organs, thus reducing him to a liquefied mess. While this would admittedly explain how he was able to slip down some of the narrower chimneys on his route, it probably wouldn’t make for very attractive Christmas cards.

      Sure, all these scientific spoilsports sound convincing enough. Although their arguments totally depend on the assumption that Santa isn’t a macroscopic quantum object capable of being in two places at once. And that he’s unable to manipulate time (though how else do they think he manages not to age in photographs?). And that he hasn’t constructed a NASA-style heat shield to protect his reindeer. Or invented a device to suppress sonic booms.

      They also assume that any of these simple explanations is more far-fetched than the idea that the vast majority of

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