Moonlighting agony uncle Professor Dirichlet answers your personal problems. Want the prof’s help? Send your problems to deardirichlet@chalkdustmagazine.com.
Dear Dirichlet,
Wedding season is coming up and I realise I need to get my suit slightly ‘adjusted’, shall we say. My local high street has a few places which offer services, but I’m hoping to get it done as economically as possible. What should I ask for?
— Mervin Miles, London NW3
Dirichlet says:
Have no fear! In my experience, it’s best to enlist two or more establishments. For your first purchase, ask the couturier to make straight line cuts only. Take all symmetric pieces (the jacket front panels, the trousers, the collar) to a second establishment, but leave all antisymmetric pieces (the buttonholes, the breast pocket) at the first. Combine the first and second order and you should have a well-fitted tailor expansion. (If it still feels a bit tight, you could always fork out for a higher-order correction.)
Dear Dirichlet,
I’m moving to a new apartment and I need to furnish the living room. This has given me two problems. Firstly, I can’t decide on a sofa. My options seem to go on forever. With every trip to SCS they all start to blur and get more and more similar. Any advice?
— Eloise, on the (con)verge of a breakdown
Dirichlet says:
You have a classic couch-y sequence. It’s a good sign that your options seem to be merging together! That means you’ve made the right design choice; they’ll make your space complete.
Dear Dirichlet,
I make furniture out of wood, but lately the raw material has been arriving in unmanageable shapes! Should I send it back or make do?
— Sabine Carpenter, North-East Mathematical Carpentry Society
Dirichlet says:
You will need to trim the pieces yourself. It is inevitable that complex logs require branch cuts.
Luckily, I can buy the scrap pieces off you. I want to make small (pointlike) wooden sculptures for my new retro nightclub, Disco ’Ntinuous. It’s almost ready to open, I just need a DJ that will get the crowd jumping.
Dear Dirichlet,
I recently bought a LLM (large language mare) from my good friend Shady Bob. He told me he’d trained her on a really sophisticated dataset, and that she would be able to do any calculation I asked of her.
The horse handles basic arithmetic fine, if a bit slowly. But when I ask her to help me to come up with a title for my Chalkdust article, she just stares at me blankly. Where am I going wrong?!
— Chat Gee-gee-T, Stafford
Dirichlet says:
Ah, it sounds like you’ve been saddled with a one-trick pony.
If you want to speed up multiplication, you’ll need more horse power – enough to get some stable calculations going. You could even set up a breeding programme; many-foaled calculations tend to move much faster.
But for your Chalkdust title, it’s bad news, I’m afraid. Your horse calculator will manage simple maths, but it will never be able to generate sophisticated jokes: you can teach a horse to quarter, but you can’t make it think.
Dear Dirichlet,
Sorry, me again with the sofa questions. I realise I have another problem—even if I choose one, I don’t know if it will fit in my living room. Help!
— Eloise, from earlier up the page
Dirichlet says:
A settee is measurable if $\forall A \subset \mathbb{R}$, $\mu^*(A) = \mu^*(A \cap E) + \mu^*(A \cap E^c)$. From there, use a ruler.
Heed Professor Dirichlet’s previous advice:
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