Level 8
副部级大学Unit 1
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The Math of Love 1
Today I want to talk to you about the mathematics of love.
Now, I think that we can all agree that mathematicians are famously excellent at finding love.
But it's not just becau of our dashing personalities, superior conversational skills and excellent pencil cas.
It's also becau we've actually done an awful lot of work into the maths of how to find the perfect partner.
Now, in my favorite paper on the subject, which is entitled, "Why I Don't Have a Girlfriend".
Peter Backus tries to rate his chances of finding love. Now, Peter's not a very greedy man.
Of all of the available women in the U.K., all Peter's looking for is somebody who lives near him, somebody in the right age range, somebody with a university degree, somebody he's likely to get on well with, somebody who's likely to be attractive, somebody who's likely to find him attractive.
And comes up with an estimate of 26 women in the whole of the UK. It's not looking very good, is it Peter?
Now, just to put that into perspective, that's about 400 times fewer than the best estimates of how many intelligent extraterrestrial life forms there are.
And it also gives Peter a 1 in 285,000 chance of bumping into any one of the special ladies on a given night out.
I'd like to think that's why mathematicians don't really bother going on nights out anymore.
The thing is that I personally don't subscribe to such a pessimistic view.
落实英文Becau I know, just as well as all of you do, that love doesn't really work like that.
Human emotion isn't neatly ordered and rational and easily predictable.
But I also know that that doesn't mean that mathematics hasn't got something that it can offer us becau, love, as with most of life, is full of patterns and mathematics is, ultimately, all about the study of patterns.
Patterns from predicting the weather to the fluctuations in the stock market, to the movement of the planets or the growth of cities.
And if we're being honest, none of tho things are exactly neatly ordered and easily predictable, either.
Becau I believe that mathematics is so powerful that it has the potential to offer us a new way of looking at almost anything. Even something as mysterious as love.
And so, to try to persuade you of how totally amazing, excellent and relevant mathematics is, I want to give you my top three mathematically verifiable tips for love.
-An extraterrestrial -...comes from somewhere other than the Earth.
The Math of Love 2英语单词发音
Okay, so Top Tip #1: How to win at online dating.
So my favorite online dating website is OkCupid, not least becau it was started by a group of mathematicians.
Now, becau they're mathematicians, they have been collecting data on everybody who us their site for almost a decade.
And they've been trying to arch for patterns in the way that we talk about ourlves and the way that we interact with each other on an online dating website.
And they've come up with some riously interesting findings.
But my particular favorite is that it turns out that on an online dating website, how attractive you are does not dictate how popular you are, and actually, having people think that you're ugly can work to your advantage.
Let me show you how this works.
In a thankfully voluntary ction of OkCupid, you are allowed to rate how attractive you think people are on a scale between 1 and 5.
naetiNow, if we compare this score, the average score, to how many messages a lection of people receive, you can begin to get a n of how attractiveness links to popularity on an online dating website.
This is the graph that the OkCupid guys have come up with.
messages you get.
But the question aris then of what is it about people up here who are so much more popular than people down here, even though they have the same score of attractiveness?
And the reason why is that it's not just straightforward looks that are important.
So let me try to illustrate their findings with an example.
lnsSo if you take someone like Portia de Rossi, for example, everybody agrees that Portia de Rossi is a very beautiful woman.
Nobody thinks that she's ugly, but she's not a supermodel, either.
If you compare Portia de Rossi to someone like Sarah Jessica Parker, now, a lot of people, mylf included, I should say, think that Sarah Jessica Parker is riously fabulous and possibly one of the most beautiful creatures to have ever have walked on the face of the Earth.
But some other people, i.e., most of the Internet, em to think that she looks a bit like a hor.
Now, I think that if you ask people how attractive they thought Sarah Jessica Parker or Portia de Rossi were, and you ask them to give them a score between 1 and 5, I reckon that they'd average out to have roughly the same score.
But the way that people would vote would be very different.
So Portia's scores would all be clustered around the 4 becau everybody agrees that she's very beautiful, whereas Sarah Jessica Parker completely divides opinion.
There'd be a huge spread in her scores. And actually, it's this spread that counts.
jailbreakIt's this spread that makes you more popular on an online Internet dating website.
So what that means then is that if some people think that you're attractive, you're actually better off having some other people think that you're a massive minger.
That's much better than everybody just thinking that you're the cute girl next door.
Now, I think this begins makes a bit more n when you think in terms of the people who are nding the messages.
So let's say that you think somebody's attractive, but you suspect that other people won't necessarily be that interested.
That means there's less competition for you and it's an extra incentive for you to get in touch.
Whereas compare that to if you think somebody is attractive but you suspect that everybody is going to think they're attractive.
Well, why would you bother humiliating yourlf, let's be honest? Here's where the really interesting part comes.
Becau when people choo the pictures that they u on an online dating website, they often try to minimize the things that they think some people will find unattractive.
The classic example is people who are, perhaps, a little bit overweight deliberately choosing a very cropped photo, or bald men, for example, deliberately choosing pictures where they're wearing hats.
determination
But actually this is the opposite of what you should do if you want to be successful.
You should really, instead, play up to whatever it is that makes you different, even if you think that some people will find it unattractive.
Becau the people who fancy you are just going to fancy you anyway, and the unimportant lors who don't, well, they only play up to your advantage.
-To -...to show the truth of something more clearly.
-If something is deliberate,-...intentional or planned.
The Math of Love 3
Okay, Top Tip #2: How to pick the perfect partner.
So let's imagine then that you're a roaring success on the dating scene.
But the question aris of how do you then convert that success into longer-term happiness and in particular, how do you decide when is the right time to ttle down?
gucci是什么意思Now generally, it's not advisable to just cash in and marry the first person who comes along and shows you any interest at all.
But, equally, you don't really want to leave it too long if you want to maximize your chance of long-term happiness.
As my favorite author, Jane Austen, puts it, "An unmarried woman of ven and twenty can never hope to feel or inspire affection again."
Thanks a lot, Jane. What do you know about love?
So the question is then, how do you know when is the right time to ttle down given all the people that you can date in your lifetime?
Thankfully, there's a rather delicious bit of mathematics that we can u to help us out here, called optimal stopping theory.
So let's imagine then, that you start dating when you're 15 and ideally, you'd like to be married by the time that you're 35.
resistantAnd there's a number of people that you could potentially date across your lifetime, and they'll be at varying levels of goodness.
Now the rules are that once you cash in and get married, you can't look ahead to e what you could have had, and equally, you can't go back and change your mind.
In my experience at least, I find that typically people don't much like being recalled years after being pasd up for somebody el, or that's just me.
So the math says then that what you should do in the first 37% of your dating window, you should just reject everybody as rious marriage potential.
And then, you should pick the next person that comes along that is better than everybody that you've en before.
So here's the example.
Now if you do this, it can be mathematically proven, in fact, that this is the best possible way of maximizing your chances of finding the perfect partner.
Now, unfortunately, I have to tell you that this method does come with some risks.
For instance, imagine if your perfect partner appeared during your first 37%. Now, unfortunately, you'd have to reject them.
Now, if you're following the maths, I'm afraid no one el comes along that's better than anyone you've en before, so you have to go on rejecting everyone and die alone.
Probably surrounded by cats nibbling at your remains.
Okay, another risk is, let's imagine, instead, that the first people that you dated in your first 37% are just incredibly dull, boring, terrible people.
英语短文故事Now, that's okay, becau you're in your rejection pha, so that's fine, you can reject them.
But then imagine, the next person to come along is just marginally less boring, dull and terrible than everybody that you've en before.
Now, if you are following the maths, I'm afraid you have to marry them and end up in a relationship which is,
