Silicon Valley viewers will be handily familiar with the dick joke from the first season finale. Within the show, the gag—an in-depth mathematical analysis of how long it would take someone to jerk off an entire room of tech nerds—gave protagonist Richard Hendriks the inspiration he needed to make Pied Piper a success. But do the group’s equations really hold up?


As it turns out, the show’s creator, Mike Judge, enlisted some honest-to-God mathematicians at Stanford University to figure out the max “mean jerk rate,” as well as other functions related to “shaft ratios: and “receptiveness to the presenter.” The resulting paper, “Optimal Tip-To-Tip Efficiency: A Model For Male Audience Stimulation” is below, and it’s as thorough and detailed as anything you saw on the show’s whiteboards. [via Gizmodo]

Optimal Tip-to-Tip Efficiency by vinithmisra