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Today i want to talk to you
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about the mathematics of love.
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I think we can all agree
that mathematicians
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are famously excellent
at finding love.
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But it's not just because
of our dashing personalities
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our superior conversational skills
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or our excellent pencil cases,
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it's also because we've done
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a lot of work into the maths
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of how to find the perfect partner.
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in my favorite paper on the subject
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which is entitled,
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"Why I Don't Have a Girlfriend."
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peter backus tries to rate
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his chances at finding love
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now, peter is not a very greedy man
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of all of the available women in the UK
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all that peter's looking for is
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somebody who lives near him,
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somebody in the right age range,
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somebody with a university degree,
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somebody he's likely to get on well with
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somebody attractive
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somebody who is likely to find him attractive
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(laughter)
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and comes up with an estimate of 26 women
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in the whole of the UK
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it's not looking very good, is it peter?
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now just to put that into perspective
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that's about 400 times fewer
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than the best estimates
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of how many intelligent
extra-terrestrial life forms there are
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and it also gives peter a
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1 in 285,000 of bumping
into any one of these special ladies
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on a night out
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I'd like to think that's why
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mathematicians don't really bother
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going on nights out anymore
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The thing is is that i personally
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don't subscribe to such a pessimistic view
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i know, just as well as you do,
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that love doesn't really work like that
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human emotion isn't neatly ordered
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rational or easily predictable
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but i also know that that doesn't mean
that mathematics
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doesn't have something it can offer us
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because, love, as with most of life
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is full of patterns
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and mathematics is ultimately
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all about the study of patterns
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pattersn from predicting the weather
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to the fluctuations of the stock market
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to the movement of the planets
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or the growth of cities
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if we're being honest, none
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of those things are neatly ordered
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or easily predictable either
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because i believe that mathematics
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is so powerful that is has the potential
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to offer us a new way of looking
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at almost anything
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even something as mysterious as love
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and so, to try to persuade you
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of how totally, excellent,
and relevant mathematics is
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I want to give you my top three
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mathematically verifiable tips for love
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okay, so, top tip #1
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how to win at online dating
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so my favorite online dating website
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is OkayCupid
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not least because it was
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started by a group of mathematicians
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now because they're mathematicians
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they have been collecting
closed TED
NG
Hi English LC,
At 14:35:88, the word 'threshhold' has an extra 'h'.
'and in particular, something called
the negativity threshhold.'
Krystian Aparta
The English transcript was updated on 2/28/2017.