does math lead to love?

these days maths, due to its relationship with geeks & technology, may appear to solve many modern problems.  I read recently a paper ‘Why I Don’t Have a Girlfriend’ where a guy attempted to prove the probability of finding a girlfriend in London.  As per article in Asylum ‘Math Geek Comes Up With Equation to Explain His Lack of a Girlfriend’:

The lovelorn economist is Peter Backus, a native of  Seattle and a fourth year PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick, near London.

In his paper he states:

The Drake Equation was developed in 1961 by Dr. Frank Drake at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in West Virginia. It reads N = R* x Fp x Ne x Fi x Fc x L, and helped predict that there could be 10,000 civilizations in our galaxy.  While extraterrestrial civilizations may be rare, there is something that is seemingly rarer still: A girlfriend. For me. What might the approach employed in the estimation of the number of alien civilizations tell us about the number of potential girlfriends for me? A somewhat less scientific question, I admit, but one of substantial personal importance.  There are 26 women in London with whom I might have a wonderful relationship. So, on a given night out in London there is a 0.0000034% chance of meeting one of these special people, about 100 times better than finding an alien civilization we can communicate with. That’s a 1 in 285,000 chance. Not great.

see more Funny Graphs

However Diego Trujillo did refute Backus’s paper and you can find his paper here.  Apparently there was a point that Backus missed and this brings more hope to the original equation.  Also as a footnote, Backus did eventually find a girlfriend in London who met his criteria.

‘Math is like love — a simple idea but it can get complicated.’ R.Drabek

OKCupid has recently caused a bit of stir in the media with some of their blog posts using mathematical data from their site to summarise matching possibilities on their site.  A couple of their posts were The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures & How Race & Religions Match in Online Dating.  In the New York Times article ‘Looking for a Date? A Site Suggests You Check the Data’ that mentioned OK Cupid‘s blog quoted an eHarmony spokesperson:

“In general, I can understand why people are looking for any general direction or indication on how to exist in the online dating world,” Mr. Waldorf said.  “But people come to us for our matchmaking skills.  They don’t want to worry about whether someone didn’t start up a conversation with them because they didn’t tilt a camera at a certain angle for their profile picture.”

However the 2nd post mentioned above caused some disapproval, see quote below:

But Terry Ip, a 23-year-old psychology student living in Queens, New York, said he preferred the approach of eHarmony and other dating sites over OkCupid’s user-generated questions. And he said that after reading a blog post on OkCupid’s site about how race affected messaging habits, he slowed down his use of the site.  “It’s kind of disappointing and says a lot about their user pool,” he said. “If you’re a white male, you’ve got it made. If you aren’t, you don’t. It’s very discouraging.”

Markus Frind, owner of PlentyofFish dating site wrote a response to OKCupid’s post on his blog The Paradigm Shift on 13th February, 2009.   Unfortunately I note that this has been removed for some reason & now the link leads to an error page.  Here is a quote from that post by Markus:

Okcupid posted a while back talking about profile pictures and how it relates to dating.     The results definitely don’t hold true beyond okcupid.  You can sum this all up by saying,  your photo on a online dating site shows your intent.   If as a women you upload a photo of you posing and looking flirty no one is going to take you seriously.    Okcupids blog shows what i’ve been saying for years,  their site is about perpetual self discovery,  intended for users under 25 who are looking for ego boosts and not dating.

In conclusion it appears that maths does not hold all the solutions to human relating issues & matching.  Statistics are a poor substitute for real chemistry & connection between people.  As Sam Yagan states in the NYT mentioned earlier in this post:

“We’re not psychologists,” said Sam Yagan, chief executive of the company. “We’re math guys.”

We cannot remove the mysterious human factor of chemistry and compatibility out of the matchmaking equation.  Statistics & equations will never be able to contain this dimension.  Would love to hear your opinions in the comments.  Here is a funny bit out of an old movie about math, enjoy….

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