Arnold Schwarzenegger may or may not have intended to send a coded message to a political adversary, but he definitely sparked interest in mathematics, reports Carl Bialik in the Wall Street Journal (11/5/09). Maybe you've heard about the acrostic message the Governator sent his legislature when he vetoed a bill recently. If you read the first letter of each of the message's seven lines, it spells out "a profane rebuke that starts with 'F' and ends with 'you'" (link). Arnold's people say the message was just a coincidence, but that seems unlikely for a number of reasons.

First, it happens that the bill's sponsor, Tom Ammiano, yelled "You lie!" as Arnold began to speak at recent Democratic Party event in San Francisco. And second, it seems like something Arnold would do. Even Tom thought it was "pretty funny." But most of all, it's the mathematicians who say the odds that the message was a coincidence are pretty slim no matter how you do the math. For instance, if you calculate that there's a 1-in-26 chance of each letter starting each line, that works out a 1 in 8.03 billion chance of coincidence.

Of course, some letters of the 26-character alphabet are used more often than others, so if you assume that Arnold's opening letters are "particularly common word openers," and assign each a 1-in-10 chance, that reduces the odds of an accident to "one in 10 million." Steven Piantadosi, an M.I.T. grad student, meanwhile, has analyzed texts "comprising 17.9 million words," and puts the odds of coincidence "at slightly less than one in one trillion." None of these calculations accounts for Arnold's personal patterns of use, but one mathematician, Edward Burger, thinks we should cut him some slack because," If nothing else, he's encouraging math education."