Name: 【TEDx】The mathematics of love | Hannah Fry | TEDxBinghamtonUniversity
Uploaded: 2018-01-06T17:41:22.000Z
Duration: 17 min 43 s
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So, yes, I'm Hannah Fry, I am a mathematician,

To-infinitive

and today I want to talk to you about the mathematics of love.

that mathematicians are famously excellent at finding love.

But it's not just because of our dashing personalities,

superior conversational skills and excellent pencil cases.

It's also because we've actually done an awful lot of work into the maths

Now, in my favorite paper on the subject, which is entitled,

"Why I Don't Have a Girlfriend" - (Laughter) -

Peter Backus tries to rate his chances of finding love.

Of all of the available women in the U.K.,

all Peter's looking for is somebody who lives near him,

somebody he's likely to get on well with,

somebody who's likely to find him attractive.

And comes up with an estimate of 26 women in the whole of the UK.

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 these special ladies

I'd like to think that's why mathematicians

don't really bother going on nights out anymore.

don't subscribe to such a pessimistic view.

Because I know, just as well as all of you do,

Human emotion isn't neatly ordered and rational and easily predictable.

that mathematics hasn't got something that it can offer us

because, 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 those things

are exactly neatly ordered and easily predictable, either.

Because I believe that mathematics is so powerful that it has the potential

to offer us a new way of looking at almost anything.

of how totally amazing, excellent and relevant mathematics is,

I want to give you my top three mathematically verifiable tips for love.

So my favorite online dating website is OkCupid,

not least because it was started by a group of mathematicians.

on everybody who uses their site for almost a decade.

And they've been trying to search for patterns

and the way that we interact with each other

And they've come up with some seriously interesting findings.

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

In a thankfully voluntary section of OkCupid,

you are allowed to rate how attractive you think people are

Now, if we compare this score, the average score,

to how many messages a selection of people receive,

of how attractiveness links to popularity on an online dating website.

This is the graph that the OkCupid guy shave come up with.

And the important thing to notice is that it's not totally true

that the more attractive you are, the more messages you get.

OK, there's maybe a bit of a trend there,

but it's got an R squared of absolutely naff all, let's be honest.

But the question arises 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 straight forward looks that are important.

So let me try to illustrate their findings with an example.

So 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, myself included, I should say,

think that Sarah Jessica Parker is seriously 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,

seem to think that she looks a bit like a horse. (Laughter)

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.

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【TEDx】The mathematics of love | Hannah Fry | TEDxBinghamtonUniversity

potential

incredibly

strategy

term