King of the Assembly Line

The social hierarchies of today's factories are complex. In the cut-and-thrust world of manufacturing, nobody gives two hoots about your football team, the cost of your alloys, or how often you say words like "innit" and "mate". Instead, the clever-clogses with the best degrees get all the respect. So, when I began work at a factory three weeks ago, I found instant adoration. Working men grovelled in humility at my Physics Master's from Imperial. In fact, there were few who could match my extensive knowledge of diode lasers or the philosophy of Descartes. In the intellectual debates which frequently raged over lunch, I put many men to shame with my knowledge of the sciences. I even found myself dabbling in some healthy corruption; solving physics problems on the side for the boss ensured I always got to operate the best machines and was first in the queue for the pie van. In short, life was good.

Now there was one man known to rule the factory floor; a fork-lift driver with a Master's from Cambridge, known simply as the Prof. I was told his understanding of the Copenhagen interpretation was unparalleled in contemporary manufacturing; he had published many important papers in respected factory journals. Everything had to go through him, and he took a disliking to my recent social advances. One day tensions came to a head when, as I sat pondering the impossibilities of Cartesian dualism over lunch, he approached me. "I challenge you to a maths-off!" he blurted. The room fell silent; all around men looked up from their Nature journals and gasped.

Maths-offs were once a regular feature of factory life. In a maths-off, two men take turns to set their opponent a difficult integral to solve. The first man to fail to evaluate the function put before him, loses. Such events can be extremely dangerous. In 1989 at a steel refinery in Lancashire, 28 workers died when a riot broke out following a maths-off. The trouble started when one of the combatants was caught using the Runge-Kutta numerical method to the fourth order. This is of course blatant cheating as the functions must be solved analytically, and the culprit was lynched for it, which led to the riot. Following this well-publicised case, the government began a crackdown, and today maths-offs are, thankfully, very rare.

Nevertheless, I accepted the challenge, and a rudimentary blackboard and chalk were produced from their hiding place underneath a workbench (blackboards have been outlawed in factories since the Mathematical Competition Act of 1990). Several men kept watch for bosses as the contest got underway. I went first, scrawling a tangle of pure algebra on the board. "Old skool, eh?" responded the Prof, and he got to work. Five minutes later the integral had been evaluated. His riposte was a fiendish arrangement of coses and sines. Murmurs circled around the room and it looked like this would be impossible to solve, but the Prof's smug smile was wiped off as he watched me convert the function to complex exponentials for an easy solution. My turn again, and I whipped out a nasty path integral. "Child's play!" said the overconfident Prof, and he wrote out his solution. As he stood back I exclaimed "You failed to notice that this was a closed path, and the integrand represents a conservative force; the answer is in fact zero." Fuming with rage, the Prof stormed off, and the maths-off was over.

From that day forth I have enjoyed the luxury of free tea from the vending machines, and my choice of radio station.