The Mammoth from Mannuthy

The only useful thing I learnt last week was that, thirty years ago, a chap from the Vet College in Mannuthy in Kerala changed the course of inter-disciplinary science by developing a mathematical formula to calculate -hold your breath, no, not breadth, I said breath - the surface area of the elephant.

You read that right.

He had been trying to solve Fermat’s Last theorem and, in the haze induced by that process, decided that the best way to do so would be to ask an elephant to lie flat on a carpet (“Stay still, Jumbo”), while he took out his tailoring tape. 

I just made this up, sorry.  

Apparently, he used the least-squares method – whatever that is (and may mathematics and its mother-in-law never torment my life again).  From all accounts of this method that I looked up online written in (reasonably) lucid English, it does not involve drawing the largest possible squares on parts of the elephant. If it did, any elephant with self-respecting nerve endings would be tickled to bits, each such bit including the remains of an erstwhile researcher as well. 

So, the question that now haunts you no doubt (and for which you continue to hold your breath – it’s getting dangerous, so think of roses) is: why did this genius, this doyen, this man-of-substance, this Einstein-of-Mannuthy do this?  (All this talk of haze and substance is controversial.  Curb the urge.)

Well, he was sipping his naadan chaya one day, when he saw a mahout struggle to climb his charge and it struck him (no, the elephant did not strike him, that would have been the end of the research using the least-square method) that all he had to do was to give the mahout a formula.  (A mahout who knows elephant-surface-area climbs easy.  Old Jungle Saying).

Sorry, I just made that story up again. 

The most notable feature of the task was that they even measured the elephant’s tail, missing no detail however slight (Sherlock H, not me). The tail was considered – for the formula – to be a cylinder, which, if you stretch your imagination with chewing gum and a rubber band coated in coconut oil, it is.  But, if the elephant’s tail is a cylinder, what is its leg, a parallelogram? (this qualifies him right away for a senior job in the Forest Department in some states in India, because that is how they count tigers). 

Finally, he calculated the areas of about 13 parts of 24 elephants (this can only be done in Kerala, one must emphasise; if you try this in Bandipur, there will be 13 parts of yours with 24 elephants, but, in serious matters of reporting facts, one should not digress).  Once that was done, he did some nifty correlation and then declared, in the spirit of Darwin, Wallace, and other luminaries who preceded him, that the formula only needed the elephant’s height and its forefoot pad circumference, both of which, of course, the said elephant is always ready to provide when (politely) asked.  Every elephant, be assured, is salivating to know its surface area.  

But, being the damp squib that I am, I have a problem with this research.  What you need to worry about with an elephant - trust me - is not its surface area, but its volume.  

And, therein, lies a tale (no, not cylindrical).

You will never have the measure of me.