Home: Blog: 2006-06-02 How To Be Young

The pursuit of youth has become an obsession in modern society.

Television advertisements offer clothes, cosmetics, even surgery, all sold with the promise of youthful appearance. More radical approaches are not uncommon. Who doesn't have a friend who has taken to wearing nappies in public, or travelling everywhere by pram, on the grounds that this will make them look younger?

But these strategies all cost money, body tissue, or people pointing at you in the street. It is surely a reflection on the weakness of our educational system that the relatively simple mathematics of age have yet to be brought to bear on the problem. The irony is that the mathematical age theory is relatively easily understood, and, once grasped, offers a route not merely to youthful appearance, but to actually being young.

Let us start with the most fundamental equation of age:

1. A = C - B

Here A is your age, C is the current year, and B the year of your birth.

This is the E=mc2 of the business of being young. A simple analysis of this formula quickly reveals that far from being the independent variable it is commonly taken for, the value of A is entirely dependent on the values of B and C.

However, this formula is perhaps over-simple. Let us take a real example to see why. (Note: for the purposes of this paper, subjects are kept anonymous, referred to only by their first names.) Julius is an Italian toga fetishist and emporer, born in 100BC. His age can therefore be calculated thus:

A = C - B

= 2006 - -100

= 2106

The chief problem with this result is that it is plainly silly. In fact, Julius has spent most of his life being dead.

Similarly, consider the case of Maria. Given that Italy has a population of over 55 million, and that in Italy everyone (men, women, pet chinchillas, trees) is called Maria, there is an overpowering statistical probability that at least one Maria will be born in Italy in 2008: it's just inevitable (cf. "How do you solve a problem like Maria?" (c) 1965 "The Sound of Music", 20th Century Fox). In Maria's case:

A = C - B

= 2006 - 2008

= -2

Only a frankly disturbing extreme of vanity would lead the unborn to worry about their age. The following condition must therefore be applied:

2. [B < C < D] A = C - B

Here, D is the year of the subject's death, and according to a standard mathematical notation which I've just made up, the bracketed expression [B < C < D] may be read "Given that B is less than C is less than D...", or in other words, given that the subject is alive at the moment.

Our aim, you will remember, is to minimise A, age. The ideal case may therefore be expressed quite simply:

3. A = 0

We must now combine this with equation (1):

4. A = C - B

   A = 0

=> 0 = C - B

=> C = B

Remember C represents the current year, and B the year of birth. It follows, therefore, that:

THE OPTIMUM STRATEGY FOR YOUTHFULLNESS IS TO BE BORN THIS YEAR.

This, then, is our preliminary finding: a simple approach to the maximisation of youth, which we might term the SPECIAL THEORY OF YOUTH.

However, this is only a specific form of the more general formula society craves: a general theory of youth.

The key to this general theory lies in a more generalised statement of our aim. Above, we expressed this as A = 0, or an age of zero. But people wish to be young in order to remain fit and healthy, and throughout the history of international sport no infant has ever been successful in competitive track or field events (* see below).

So more commonly, people simply wish to be "younger", rather than zero years old. This is expressed mathematically by saying that age "tends towards" zero, or:

5. A -> 0

But A is the difference between birth year B and current year C. So as A tends towards 0:

6. C -> B

This means that, to be young, you must keep the current year as low as possible.

Also, if C is getting closer to B, the converse must also be true, so:

7. B -> C

This suggests that, to be young, you must maximise your birth date.

From (6) and (7) we can therefore derive the two laws of THE GENERAL THEORY OF YOUTH:

1. MEASURE YOUR AGE IMMEDIATELY.

2. DON'T BE BORN SO SOON.

These simple rules will maximise your youth without surgery or cosmetics. Can it be merely a coincidence that the well funded health and beauty industry has sought to suppress these findings, and to influence government to deny every application for research funds I have so far made?

Manny

(* The case of the East German Otto Johan Fischer, who won a silver medal triple jumping at the Montreal Games 1964 at the age of 37 weeks, has long been surrounded by controversy. See Professor Michael Stevens exhaustive analysis "The Bouncing Baby: Infant Hero or Sport-Chemicals Victim", ISBN 283-89984, Cambridge University Press.)