The mathematics of love

About this book

There is no topic that attracts more attention, more energy and time and devotion, than love. As long as there's been recorded history, love has taken center seat as the inspiration for countless paintings, instigator of wars, muse of untold poets and musicians. And just as poetry, art and music have the ability to communicate something about love that is difficult to articulate with words, the same is true of mathematics. Of course, mathematics can't easily help us translate the emotional side of love, emotions rarely behave in a neatly ordered, rational and easily predictable way. It is difficult to quantify the rollercoaster of romance or to define how lovers might feel via a set of simple equations. But that doesn't mean that mathematics isn't crucial to understanding love. Love, like most things in life, is full of patterns. And mathematics is ultimately the study of patterns, from predicting the weather to the fluctuations of the stock market, the movement of planets or the growth of cities. These patterns twist and turn and warp and evolve just as the rituals of love do. In this book, Hannah Fry takes the listener on a journey through the patterns that define our love lives, tackling some of the most common yet complex questions pertaining to love: What's the chance of us finding love? What's the chance that it will last? How does online dating work, exactly? When should you settle down? How can you avoid divorce? When is it right to compromise? Can game theory help us decide whether or not to call? From evaluating the best strategies for online dating to defining the nebulous concept of beauty, Dr. Fry proves that math is a useful tool to negotiate the complicated, often baffling, sometimes infuriating, always interesting, patterns of love.