Revenge of the revenge of the nerds

You know how in cartoons and movies, there's often the comic scene in which some 98-pound weakling with tape on his glasses competes in some athletic contest, and everyone laughs at him until he scribbles a lot of cryptic equations on a blackboard (or looks at some graphics on a computer) and then computes some secret highly scientific method that allows him to win?

I was always a little steamed that that never actually worked.