Terrence Howard isn’t just a star of one of the most addictive television shows of recent years. According to him, he’s a mathematical genius who has discovered the Only True Math. Before his marriage to Mira Pak disintegrated, the pair worked 17-hour days together on models mean to demonstrate his mathematical system. He calls it Teratology, and it’s all built around the idea that 1 x 1 = 2 instead of 1.
The Rolling Stone feature in which Howard also discusses watching his father murder someone lays out what Howard believes is ground-breaking work:
It might seem crazy, it may even be crazy, but a long time ago he’d gotten hold of this notion that one times one doesn’t equal one, but two. He began writing down his logic, in a language of his own devising that he calls Terryology. He wrote forward and backward, with both his right and left hands, sometimes using symbols he made up that look foreign, if not alien, to keep his ideas secret until they could be patented. In 2013, he got married again, to an L.A. restaurateur named Mira Pak, and the two would spend up to 17 hours a day cutting shapes out of the plastic and joining them together into various objects meant to demonstrate not only his one-times-one theory but many others as well.
His living room is filled with the models they created. “There are hemispheres, cubes, tetrahedrons and flighty wings,” reporter Erik Hedegaard describes. “Some of the objects are as small as mice, others as big as fire hydrants; some are hanging, some free-standing, a few larger ones lit from the inside with LED twinkle stars. They are gorgeous and otherworldly.”
“He has no name for them. They just are,” he continues. “He loves them just as much as he loves himself and his infant son, Qirin, who is sleeping nearby and will one day inherit U.S. patent 20150079872 A1 (“Systems and methods for enhanced building-block applications”), among others.”
Terrence truly believes that Pythagoras, Einstein, and Tesla would all have their minds blown by his new theory of math, and that one day his revolutionary logic will be recognized because it is absolutely true. “This is the last century that our children will ever have been taught that one times one is one,” he says. “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.”
Terrence also revealed that all the money he’s getting from the successful Fox show Empire is being garnished for child support, and that his wife (from whom he was estranged, though they pretended to be together for the piece), is supporting him.
