LOVE AND DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS

calculusWhat an exciting promise Steven Strogatz seemed to offer with "Loves Me, Loves Me Not (Do the Math". He sets out to examine love affairs "mathematically", suggesting that equations that summarise specific romantic behaviour can then be solved with calculus. The result is a way to "predict the course" of an affair.

Finally! A way to make sense of matters of the heart! Surely it was only a matter of time. I hated calculus in college, but if differential equations do indeed "represent the most powerful tool humanity has ever created for making sense of the material world," as Strogatz suggests (a la Newton), then I'd be happy to dust off my graphing calculator, pump up my left-lateralised cortical network, and get to work.

Alas, Strogatz delivered a cunning bait and switch:

In all cases, the business of theoretical physics boils down to finding the right differential equations and solving them... The silly idea that love affairs might progress in a similar way occurred to me when I was in love for the first time, trying to understand my girlfriend’s baffling behavior... The cycling of our relationship was driving me crazy until I realized that we were both acting mechanically, following simple rules of push and pull. But by the end of the summer my equations started to break down, and I was even more mystified than ever. As it turned out, the explanation was simple. There was an important variable that I’d left out of the equations—her old boyfriend wanted her back.

Ah. Well, I suppose there's that. Strogatz attempts to elegantly recover some math cred:

In mathematics we call this a three-body problem. It’s notoriously intractable, especially in the astronomical context where it first arose. After Newton solved the differential equations for the two-body problem (thus explaining why the planets move in elliptical orbits around the sun), he turned his attention to the three-body problem for the sun, earth and moon. He couldn’t solve it, and neither could anyone else. It later turned out that the three-body problem contains the seeds of chaos, rendering its behavior unpredictable in the long run.

So the bad news: love will never make sense. The good news: that graphing calculator can stay in the box.

~ EMILY BOBROW

 

Picture credit: Failblog.org

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Cute

July 22, 2009 - 19:48 — Visitor (not verified)

That sounds like a hilarious book. I decided years ago, as a graduate student in behavioral ecology-- if a behavior expert can't figure this out who can, right?-- not to bother trying to figure out what people are "really" doing or up to. Fire ants, naked mole-rats and the homeless (occasionally) I encounter around town can each be figured out pretty easily, but people, such as lovers, wives, girlfriends, I'll never figure them out! So I just do what I do and hope it doesn't interfere with what they would like me to do...

Doesn't sound promising...

October 20, 2009 - 11:51 — Mike (not verified)

if the most powerful tool ever created by humanity for making sense of the material world cannot work out the results of the interaction of three bodies. This must be of some concern to those in charge of China with a population of over 1.3 billion, in relatively close proximity to each other.