I apologize that the mathematician character perpetuates the stereotype of the socially inept math nerd, but in all honesty, he's based more on myself than anyone else. And the story is far more in the tradition of Douglas Adams than, say, Arthur C Clarke. It's meant to stimulate the brain, yes, but the priority is the funny bone.

“So what is this new data you are so excited about, Eddie?” she asked as he took a seat opposite her.

“It's a smoking frickin' gun!”

“So you raved.”

“It's all right here,” he said, handing her a 250MB Zip disk. “Using the latest data and new mathematical models of analysis, synthesizing work in separate mathematical subdisciplines. The Fishman Reduction Theorem is now complete. This is neato with a capital N! Cool with a capital C! I'll probably get the Fields medal!”

“Down, boy,” Cindy requested.

“All right. All right,” Eddie said, calming down for a few seconds, then pulling out sheaves of printouts from his satchel. “Ooh, ooh! It's so cool! You've got to see these contingency tables and chi-square distributions. And just look at this linear regression model! It's a thing of beauty!” Eddie held up a few papers covered by graphs.

“I don't think the Mona Lisa has anything to worry about.”

“And check out these data here,” Eddie said, pointing at a chart. “This essentially proves that milk consumption offers no protection against osteo- porosis.” He pulled out more charts and graphs. “This shows a clear, inarguable contribution to breast cancer, and this here shows an absolutely air- tight causative relationship between infant-formula consumption and juvenile diabetes.

“It was all speculation before, and the dairy industry could write it off to other factors, statistical anomalies and whatnot, but not anymore! All the math has finally come together. I've figured out how to rip that signal from the jaws of noise. It's . . . it's . . .” He struggled in all his nerdy glory to explain his esoteric passion in terms comprehensible to the great unwashed innumerate masses. “It's like the unified field theorem of statistical meta- analysis!” His glasses slid right off his face, lubricated by excited sweat, and he crammed them back on.

Cindy nodded, understanding some of what he had just said, but still finding much of it to be in a foreign, non-Indo-European language. “Do you want to make one last attempt to explain this in plain English, Eddie?”

Eddie again inhaled deeply, then let the air leak slowly back out. Speaking in plain English is by far the greatest hurdle mathematicians have to sur- mount. Much more difficult than, say, solving partial differential equations or analyzing higher-dimensional arrays.

“Okay. Say you've got some epidemiological data that suggests a relationship between some cause and some disease, but you don't get a smooth, straight line, because there are so many additional variables. Differences in smoking rates, exercise, other dietary factors, genetic differences in populations, overall life expectancy, and so on. So the traditional conclusion is that the system is far too complex to analyze. Too much noise and not enough signal.”

“Okay.”

“But you see, there are strange attractors within the chaotic multidimensional phase space describing human nutrition and health!”

“Your lips move, but I can't hear what you're saying.”

“That means there's a signal in that noise!” Eddie said, jumping up from his seat and waving his hand, no longer able to contain himself. Cindy moved her coffee to another table.