This summer has featured a number of occasions where I got roped into a group photo, always enduring an annoying number of “just one more” shots. With this in mind, a retrospective in September’s Popular Science on the 25th anniversary of the Ig Nobel awards caught my eye by calling out the 2006 Mathematics award. This honor went to two Australian researchers who calculated that, for group photos of 20 or fewer people, you must divide the count by three and take that many photos to ensure that everyone’s eyes will be open.
Check out what to do if there are more than 20 in your group, noting that things become hopeless beyond a count of 50, and the underlying statistical calculations detailed in “Blink-free Photos, Guaranteed,” Nic Svenson, Australasian Science, August 2006, p48.
Upon accepting the award for frivolous research, the lead scientist, physicist Piers Barnes, said that
“We are proud to have made a gross simplification of complex physiological and psychological factors backed up with no empirical data. Like many other theories, if enough assumptions are made, we are confident that our expression holds.”
(Source: This phys.org press release.)