Bistromathic drive
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The Bistromathic Drive is a fictional type of starship propulsion system in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It is used in Slartibartfast's craft Starship Bistromath and works by exploiting the irrational mathematics that apply to numbers on a waiter's check pad and groups of people in restaurants. Life, the Universe and Everything describes bistromathics as follows: "Bistromathics itself is simply a revolutionary new way of understanding the behaviour of numbers. Just as Einstein observed that space was not an absolute but depended on the observer's movement in space, and that time was not an absolute, but depended on the observer's movement in time, so it is now realized that numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer's movement in restaurants." An important concept of bistromathics is recipriversexcluson: being anything other than itself.
Further explanation of the theory behind Bistromathematics: "The first nonabsolute number is the number of people for whom the table is reserved. This will vary during the course of the first three telephone calls to the restaurant, and then bear no apparent relation to the number of people who actually turn up, or the number of people who subsequently join them after the show/math/party/gig, or to the number of people who leave when they see who else has shown up.
The second nonabsolute number is the given time of arrival, which is now known to be one of those most bizarre mathematical concepts, a recipriversexluson, a number whose existence can only be defined as being anything other than itself. In other words, the given time of arrival is the one moment of time at which it is impossible that any member of the party will arrive. Recipriversexclusons now play a vital part in many branches of math, including statistics and accountancy, and also form the basic equations used to engineer the Somebody Else's Problem field.
The third and most mysterious piece of nonabsoluteness of all lies in the relationship between the number of items on the check, the cost of each item, the number of people at the table and what they are each prepared to pay for. (The number of people who have actually brought any money is only a sub-phenomenon in this field)"