Apparently I’ve been living under a rock. I had no idea that such a show existed, not until I googled “real life heptagon” to see if there were any I didn’t know about. I didn’t find any, but that might be because I stopped looking when I discovered this article by Adam Reinhard. Here’s an excerpt (although I wanted to quote the whole thing):
The four pairs of impossibly fit, impossibly hot, impossibly stupid catwalkers were tasked with designing and making outfits based on simple geometric shapes….[A pair], working with the rhombus and the trapezoid, decked out the female partner like an 80s glam girl-slash-Transformer. The outfit produced the greatest meeting of the minds I’ve ever seen on VH1, when model Blonde Rachel mispronounced rhombus as “rhommus” and show host Mary Alice Stephenson corrected her, leading to this brilliant exchange: “Rhombus.” “Rhombus?” “Rhombus.” “Rhombus?” It’s the most the equilateral quadrilateral has ever been mentioned on basic cable.
So naturally I headed over to the show’s site, and got caught up in reading the daily questions that the models are supposed to answer. Sadly, I didn’t see any about mathematics; the closest was back on December 4, when contestants had to answer, “Based on human history, what do you think is the luckiest number and why?” You can find the answers — 13 pages of them — here. I admit, I haven’t read them all, but I did find some thought-provoking comments like “i would have to say the number 4 because its the earliest number that you can use to count with….1,2,3,4.” Okay then. Poor ruox54, who gave that answer, only has smartness rank of 1255, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that in general there’s not quite as strong a correlation between the smartness rank and the quality of the answers as I might have expected. (Though whether that says more about the show or more about me is an open question.)
360 
January 15, 2008 at 4:07 pm |
“i would have to say the number 4 because its the earliest number that you can use to count with….1,2,3,4”
It is hard to argue, with reasoning like that.
Maybe they are proposing that we recast the world using base five arithmetic? (Think how much simpler multiplication and long division would be!)
January 15, 2008 at 4:37 pm |
I just read all thirteen pages… Oh the humanity.
One of my favorites: “the luckiest number is 3,6,9 their just odd numbers luck is very odd it self. ”
Bonus points for creative spelling.
January 15, 2008 at 5:18 pm |
Oh the horror, the HORROR! Beware, America’s Most Smartest Model is incredibly addicting.
Not quite a mathematical question, but…
Q: What obsolete technology would you bring back from the past and put it to a new use? (ex. The beeper)
Best answer so far: The Amtrak Player. [Almost certainly a “typo” for “8 track player”]
January 15, 2008 at 6:24 pm |
I am reminded of Sir Isaac Newton’s comments on his use of series to construct a decimal expansion for pi: “I am ashamed to tell you to how many figures I carried these calculations, having no other business at the time.”
January 15, 2008 at 7:30 pm |
OK, I know it’s not America’s Most Smartest Model, but it just doesn’t get any better (worse?) than this video (which I’m sure many of you have already seen dozens of times).