{"id":187,"date":"2009-05-29T21:48:00","date_gmt":"2009-05-29T21:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/2009\/05\/29\/187\/"},"modified":"2010-06-19T15:21:26","modified_gmt":"2010-06-19T20:21:26","slug":"187","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=187","title":{"rendered":"THE MATHEMATICS OF LOVE"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here\u2019s my candidate for the most interesting article of the week: \u201cLoves Me, Loves Me Not (Do the Math)\u201d<\/a> By Steven Strogatz, in the Wild Side blog on the NY Times.<\/p>\n

Dr. Strogatz<\/a>, a mathematician noted for his work in chaos theory and the dynamics of complex, non-linear systems, wrote about how certain math equations and concepts help to describe what he had experienced as a young man in love. Well, there\u2019s a lot of overlap between love and chaos,and if any scientists are ever going to have anything to say about romantic love, it\u2019s going to be the chaos experts. The psychologists have been trying for years, but without much luck; only the math people who search for (and find) hidden patterns within the crazy swirls of reality (e.g. stock prices, political campaigns, virus infections, insect colonies, etc.) can even get close to what courtship and romantic love involve. <\/p>\n

Most people are still pretty cynical as to whether math and science can really tell us anything about love and relationships. And ultimately they\u2019re right; love is ultimately an experiential thing. The realm of science, as broad and powerful as it is, stops just short of being able to fully explain an experience. This reality is at the heart of the \u201cconsciousness problem\u201d in the field of \u201cphilosophy of mind\u201d. You can look up the comments that were sent in response to Dr. Strogatz\u2019s article, and more than half of them are rather dismissive about what the professor seems to be attempting. Many of these commentors try to pass him off with a bit of humor (the good doctor himself seemed to end the article on a tongue-in-cheek note). Emily Bobrow on The Economist\u2019s \u201cMore Intelligent Life\u201d blog<\/a> does about the same. <\/p>\n

As with the mind, science can only go so far in talking about love. But that still might be much fartherer than most people think. A few years ago, a book came out called \u201cThe Mathematics of Marriage\u201d<\/a>, based on a long-term study done of married couples led by Dr. John M. Gottman. Dr. Gottman and his team came up with a mathematical system to describe marital dynamics, based on chaos theory (and more specifically, \u201ccatastrophe theory\u201d), and applied these equations across a sample of married couples over time. These couples were recorded talking to each other on video, and were then analyzed and classified based on the types of emotional responses being exchanged by man and wife during their conversations. The bottom line: if Dr. Gottman analyzed an hour of a husband and wife talking, he predicted with 95% accuracy whether a couple would be married 15 years later. And if he watched a couple for just 15 minutes, his success rate only dropped to 90%. Hmm, not bad if true (I didn\u2019t read the book or the study, so I can\u2019t really judge it). <\/p>\n

SO, perhaps science will never tell us exactly why we exist in this universe as feeling beings. But it already can tell us a lot about how we obtain those feelings and what we do in response to them. And in the future it will be able to do this better and better (although it will never be able to predict any one individual\u2019s course of actions in detail for long periods of time; there\u2019s too much \u201cchaos\u201d and not enough information practically available about complex human relationships, just as the chaos in the atmosphere and limitations on weather data collection prevent us from accurately predicting the weather too far in advance). As with any scientific tool, it will be up to us whether we use this for good or for evil. As with most significant scientific tools from the past two or three centuries, the potential goodness will be VERY good, and the potential evil will be VERY evil. <\/p>\n

PS, here\u2019s another blog comment on the Strogatz column by Rick Nelson<\/a>, a fellow engineering guy. <\/p>\n

And here\u2019s an article from 2003 in Slate about Dr. Gottman\u2019s study and his book:
Love by the Numbers<\/a>; Can a few differential equations describe the course of a marriage? by Jordan Ellenber.<\/p>\n

PPS, On a different but familiar topic, i.e. General Motors; my favorite quote for the week is from Judge Richard Posner\u2019s blog<\/a> on The Atlantic web site: \u201cWe should be concerned lest GM become a kind of economic Vietnam\u201d. <\/p>\n

PPPS: I see that Obama is going to appoint a \u201cCiber Czar\u201d, after recently appointing an \u201cAuto Czar\u201d (Ed Montgomery). OK, we know what a \u201cczar\u201d is (a.k.a. \u201ctsar\u201d, a Russian dictator from the 16th thru early 20th Century), but where did that word originate? In ancient Rome, of course; czar is just a Russian corruption of \u201cCaesar\u201d, reflecting the old Russian myth that it had inherited the legacy of the Roman Empire when Russia converted to Eastern Christianity (around 1000 AD), followed by the fall of the Byzantine Empire to the Turks (pretty much done by 1350, but with Constantinople holding out until 1453). Hopefully, President Obama is not going to appoint himself \u201cCasear of the Czars\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here\u2019s my candidate for the most interesting article of the week: \u201cLoves Me, Loves Me Not (Do the Math)\u201d By Steven Strogatz, in the Wild Side blog on the NY Times. Dr. Strogatz, a mathematician noted for his work in chaos theory and the dynamics of complex, non-linear systems, wrote about how certain math equations […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,9,23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=187"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1609,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187\/revisions\/1609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}