Cleverly clothe the children of a geek

July 20, 2012 8:07 AM

Help me come up with math-themed "big brother"/"little sister" shirt designs for a friend's kids.

I want to come up with some clever t-shirts for a friend's kids. She has two sons (ages 5 and 1.5) and just had twin daughters. She is an actuary. I would love to come up with some kind of design for the shirts that involves math or science or something like that.

I was trying to think of something involving HTML or some other programming language...maybe math formulas...heck, even Excel formulas. I tried looking at the periodic table of the elements for inspiration, but came up with nothing (their names can't be built out of the elements, I tried that.)

I just want something more clever than "big brother" and "little sister". Something that plays off the babies being twins (fraternal, otherwise I'd figure out something involving copying and pasting) would be cute, but not necessary.

posted by pyjammy to Clothing, Beauty, & Fashion (9 answers total)

You could use something related to Twin Primes perhaps.
posted by bessel functions seem unnecessarily complicated at 8:21 AM on July 20, 2012

Replace with actual names:

Mom > 5y/o > 1.5y/o > twin1 = twin2
posted by EndsOfInvention at 8:24 AM on July 20, 2012 [1 favorite]

Or different t-shirts for each person:
Mom: "v1.0"
5y/o: "v2.0"
1.5y/o: "v3.0"
twins: "v4.1" and "v4.2"
posted by EndsOfInvention at 8:26 AM on July 20, 2012

Response by poster: I should have mentioned, there IS a dad, so where would he fit in to these?
posted by pyjammy at 8:29 AM on July 20, 2012

Hmm, maybe make mum and dad "Developers" and the kids v1.0, v2.0, and v.3.1/v3.2.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 8:51 AM on July 20, 2012

Perhaps something with composite numbers made from carefully-selected primes?

You will need four prime numbers: p, q, r and s. These could be chosen to be significant numbers, if for example Mum or Dad was born in 1973, 1979, 1987, etc (as these numbers are prime).

Dad's T-shirt: a (where a = p × q)
Mum's T-shirt: b (where b = r × s)

The 5 year-old and 1½ year old would then be labelled c (= p × r) and d (= s × q). This ties in with the idea of each of them getting fifty percent of their DNA from each parent.

With a clever choice of numbers you could do something clever like have the five year-old's number (c) be 3⅓ times that of the 1½ year-old.
posted by alby at 8:51 AM on July 20, 2012

Admittedly a cheesy idea, but what if you drew each of the kids as squares with side lengths of their respective ages (1, 1, 2, and 5), and draw lines on the bigger two to show the number of units (4, 25). Give them goofy smiles and balloons and stuff, and a message about being 'perfect.'

And maybe the parent/s as scalene triangles if she'd find it funny.
posted by null14 at 10:50 AM on July 20, 2012

I'm just picturing P on one and NP on another in a large, simple font. Or maybe O(1) on the smaller one and O(n) on the larger.
posted by monkeymadness at 2:37 PM on July 20, 2012

Oh, sorry. I misunderstood. Maybe O(1) on the twins, then O(n) and O(n^2). Of course, replace n^2 with n squared.
posted by monkeymadness at 2:39 PM on July 20, 2012