A math joke in Gravity's Rainbow

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

Now, having just what Berger/Luckmann call "the sociologist's 
kitchen-statistics", I certainly will not claim any math knowledge here. 
I read /Principia Mathematica/ (to improve my understanding of 
Wittgenstein), and I even read /Laws of Form/ (to improve my 
understanding of Luhmann) several
times, but felt very dull during those reads. And I do not get the math 
joke on p. 450 of GR at all. I
simply don't. What's so funny about the houseboat formula and what's its 
function in the overall architecture of /Gravity's Rainbow/? Also wonder 
whether this math joke is typical for Pynchon's take
on science. Anyone?


   "Well, you can't help but wonder who's really the more paranoid of 
the two

here. Steve's sure got a lot of gall badmouthing Charles that way. Among the

hilarious graffiti of visiting mathematicians,

?___1_d (cabin)=log cabin + c=houseboat,

(cabin)

that sort of thing, they go poking away down the narrow sausage-shaped

latrine now, two young/old men, their feet fade and cease to ring on the 
sloping

steel deck, their forms grow more transparent with distance until it's 
impossible

to see them any more. Only the empty compartment here, the S-curved spokes

on the peep-show machines, the rows of mirrors directly facing, 
reflecting each

other, frame after frame, back in a curve of very great radius. Out to 
the end of

this segment of curve is considered part of the space of the 
/Rücksichtslos. /Making

it a rather fat ship. Carrying its right-of-way along with it. "Crew 
morale,"

whispered the foxes at the Ministry meetings, "sailors' superstitions. 
Mirrors at

high midnight. /We /know, don't we?""**


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