Wow. Three top notch reponses to my little theorem. Props to barryp, Pseudonym, and especially schoen. In case anyone was wondering I wasn't trying to get you to do my homework. I haven't done homework in years... perhaps if I were doing homework my math wouldn't be so rusty.

I took a lot of math classes in college, some calculus, and statistics, and discrete math thru the computer science department. I did well in most of them, but when it comes to real world application my math skills seem so feeble. It's like I know enough math to want to prove my ideas but not enough math to actually get the job done.

For instance, how did you guys know log(256^n) was the way to get the maximum number of symbols in an encoding? In my first attempts at a proof I had a function maxlength(n) but I didn't know how to break that function into mathematical elements to reach a QED.