14 DAY TRIAL // Following months of anticipation and not knowing what to expect from one of the most fickle but also most talented female singers of our times, April 2008 brought to fans Mariah Carey’s eleventh studio material, “E=MC2.”
It was not only a good album, in the sense that it had the necessary ingredients to make it a hit, but also aptly named, hinting at a new identity of the diva and perhaps mathematical affinities that we were not even aware she had. Not so, Sense About Science warns in a recently released statement, bashing Mariah.
The organization, which functions as a charity but is made up of mathematicians and, in a nutshell, people who know their way around numbers, has made a purpose out of making a list of celebrities who mislead the public. The aim is, they say, not to publicly humiliate said celebs, but to show that their erroneous statements, often made in a rush or because they simply “sound good,” can make the general public go astray. Mariah’s case and her choice for an album title fit in here just perfectly.
Mathematician Dr. David Leslie spoke to BBC about why they also chose Carey to occupy a frontmost position on the list, and brought as argument the fact that the singer basically “misread the algebra” when she chose the name of the album. That is because, when asked about her choice, Mariah told the media that it stood for the “emancipation equals Mariah Carey times two.”
Dr. Leslie’s solid theory clearly shows that Mariah was wrong about her choice and, what’s perhaps even worse, that no one dared tell her that. “The ‘two’ in the equation means C squared, not MC multiplied by two. The correct reading of the equation is E=MCC, so perhaps Mariah’s re-interpretation should have been ‘emancipation equals Mariah Carey Carey’?” Dr. Leslie told BBC.
Despite various attempts to contact the diva, she was not available for comment on the reported slip-up.