The Mathematics of Love: Patterns, Proofs, and the Search for the Ultimate Equation (Ted Books)

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It tells you that if you are destined to date ten people in your lifetime, you have the highest probability of finding The One when you reject your first four lovers (where you’d find them 39.87 percent of the time). If you are destined to date twenty people, you should reject the first eight (where Mister or Miz Right would be waiting for you 38.42 percent of the time). And, if you are destined to date an infinite number of partners, you should reject the first 37 percent, giving you just over a one in three chance of success. All of which are really great conditions for running away from a predator, or fighting aggressively to protect the tribe. And survival. So when you have less blood in the periphery you create what Malcolm Gladwell calls a bloodless armor that lets you strike without really bleeding too much, or run away without hurting yourself too much. But in the context of a discussion with somebody you love clearly this DPA is not very functional. And we found in fact that physiological arousal is one of the best predictors of what happens to that relationship. That's why it predicts. But we are far from being done. There's so much we don't understand. Like sex. We have no clue about how sex works in relationships, how it fits into everyday interaction, what good sex really is like, what great sex really is, what everyday sex is, how it all works or fails. We have no descriptive data. A lot of that is because we are such a prudish, low-touch culture. The New York Times recently reported, in an article about Kinsey, that 100 million dollars of awarded research funds had been reversed by the religious right in the USA because they think that federal dollars shouldn't be doing this kind of research. Even when it has health benefits, like understanding how AIDS spreads. This has got to stop. We need to know about sex so we can advise couples, and so we can understand. We just have Masters and Johnson's great breakthroughs, but they only really studied masturbation, not sexual relations. So there is still a great frontier out there. but Hannah's narration and the fact that she doesn't shy away from mentioning some of HER dating disasters as well, is what won me over.

Emma Darwin, happily, seems able to immerse herself in 19th Century England” ... Both eerie and intriguing. - Australian Financial Review As any mathematically minded person will tell you, it’s a fine balance between having the patience to wait for the right person and the foresight to cash in before all the good ones are taken. He aquí un libro realmente curioso que llamó mi atención entre los títulos de divulgación científica. El hecho de haber descubierto una serie de libros de TED ya es de por sí muy prometedor, pero la temática de este ejemplar en concreto me atrajo demasiado. Another puzzle I'm working on is just what happens when a baby enters a relationship. Our study shows that the majority (67%) of couples have a precipitous drop in relationship happiness in the first 3 years of their first baby's life. That's tragic in terms of the climate of inter-parental hostility and depression that the baby grows up in. That affective climate between parents is the real cradle that holds the baby. And for the majority of families that cradle is unsafe for babies. I called them off and went closer. The lad’s eyes were wide with fright and my approach served only to make him redouble his efforts to escape.There is no topic that attracts more attention-more energy and time and devotion- than love. Love, like most things in life, is full of patterns. And mathematics is ultimately the study of patterns. It is 1819 and Stephen Fairhurst wants only to forget the horrors of Waterloo and remember the great and secret love he lost. But, despite his friendship with the clever Lucy Durward, he cannot tell her about the darkness in his past. The strange allure of Emma Darwin’s debut novel, The Mathematics of Love, reflects its enigmatic title. If there’s anything numerical about our affections, it’s higher math than most of us can compute, like the formulas behind snowflakes or hurricanes, and a similar sort of complexity makes this story just as fascinating. . . If you’re in a book club torn between lovers of 19th century and modern fiction, The Mathematics of Love may be just the thing to square the circle. The bilingual dexterity of this novel is one of its several triumphs as Darwin alternates between the murky moral chaos of the 1970s and the rigid formality of the genteel class in the early 19th century. Anna and Fairhurst, living in the same space though separated by time and unimaginable social changes, are equally haunting characters, the parallels between their lives tantalizing and evocative... [T]he two stories that Darwin tells here add up to something hauntingly beautiful.” - Washington Post Book World However, some of the interactions in the 20th century sections would today be given the label of ‘abuse’, even though they are written with immense tenderness through the eyes of a willing ‘victim’. That conflict was the only discomfort that remained as I finished a thoroughly satisfying read.

This is that rare thing, a book that works on every conceivable level. Plot, pace, language and tone combine to produce an uncommonly good read, a piece of quietly confident writing that is remarkable in a first novel… This is a novel of extremes: there is suffering, violent and disturbing portraits of war and of personal loss; but equally extreme moments of joy and human understanding. At its core are the emotions that most shape us — love and loss. I took a brace of pigeon on the edge of one of the furthest coppices, however, and as the light began to fade, observed half-a-dozen rabbits at their evening browse on the far side of the meadow. I reloaded while calling quietly to the dogs, lest they bound off in pursuit of this legitimate canine prey, and began to move in. It sounds as if we have a stake in relationships staying together — but we don't. My major stake is in understanding. We have a stake in people not staying together if they don't feel good about their relationship and it's not really going anywhere for them, it's not really helping them build one another's dreams, it's not a relationship that has dignity. But we like to help people understand why it is that it didn't work, so that the next relationship, or next set of relationships, can be better. One of the major things we found is that honoring your partner's dreams is absolutely critical. A lot of times people have incompatible dreams — or they don't want to honor their partner's dreams, or they don't want to yield power, they don't want to share power. So that explains a lot of times why they don't really belong together. This is similar to another book i loved: Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (a book about behavioral economics),Mathematics is the language of nature. It is the foundation stone upon which every major scientific and technological achievement of the modern era has been built. It is alive, and it is thriving.