Terrence Howard challenges the times tables
September 15, 2015 / 1:58 PM / CBS News
Terrence Howard believes that we've got arithmetic all wrong.
The "Empire" villain told Rolling Stone that he does not believe one times one equals one.
"How can it equal one?" he said. "If one times one equals one that means that two is of no value because one times itself has no effect. One times one equals two because the square root of four is two, so what's the square root of two? Should be one, but we're told it's two, and that cannot be."
We lost you there, Terrence.
Unsurprisingly, Howard's teachers did not agree with his theory, and he subsequently left Pratt Institute, where he was studying chemical engineering.
"I mean, you can't conform when you know innately that something is wrong," he explained.
Howard calls his parallel take on math "Terrylogy." The actor said he spends time cutting and re-forming scissors, wire, magnets and sheets of plastic to illustrate his one-times-one theory and other similar theories he has. He told the magazine that he and his ex-wife Mira Pak would spend up to 17 hours a day creating these illustrations.
The Rolling Stone writer described Howard's creations as "building blocks but the shapes are infinitely more complex, in two dimensions and three, tied together by copper wire or held in place by magnets." Howard said he hopes to inherit U.S. patent 20150079872 A1 ("Systems and methods for enhanced building-block applications"), among others.
The "Hustle and Flow" actor also said that Pythagoras, Einstein and Tesla would "lose [their minds]" if they saw Terryology.
"Since I was a child of three or four," he said, "I was always wondering, you know, why does a bubble take the shape of a ball? Why not a triangle or a square? I figured it out."
Howard added that he hopes to change the course of education.
"This is the last century that our children will ever have been taught that one times one is one," he said. "They won't have to grow up in ignorance. Twenty years from now, they'll know that one times one equals two. We're about to show a new truth. The true universal math."
We'll have to check up in 20 years.
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Andrea Park
Andrea is an entertainment producer at CBSNews.com
First published on September 15, 2015 / 1:58 PM
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