The Way of Least Resistance

Introduction The other night I dreamt I was back at university, in a mathematics lecture. The lecturer writes up Pierre de Fermat's last theorem 1 on the board as follows: c n = a n + b n , where n = 3 or greater, has no possible solution. Instead of asking us to prove the theorem, he simply says: "How many variables are there?" I woke up and wondered about that piece of cheese I'd eaten the night before. Then I started thinking about the substance of the dream: How many "variables" are there in, say, c 3 = a 3 + b 3 ? And how does this compare with the number of "variables" in Pythagoras' theorem c 2 = a 2 + b 2 ? Pure mathematics relating to number theory arguably has no practical application. Yet I realised that maybe, just maybe, my subconscious was telling me something "useful" in martial terms. Flawed dimensional analysis It seems to me that when marital artists analyse techniques, they often do so in either 2 dimens...