My Take | What the mathematics of marriage and divorce tells us about China-US relations
- If relations between the two countries are the most important for world peace and prosperity today, they cannot be left to the belligerents themselves
All is fair in love and war. All is also fair when love dies and divorce proceedings begin, and that’s when the war really starts. It turns out that talks of love, divorce and war are more than just metaphors; they may be mathematically equivalent.
I was recently reading a newspaper interview with British mathematician and complexity theorist Hannah Fry, who once delivered a TED Talk on “the mathematics of love” that has been watched millions of times online.
Two algebraic equations, first devised by psychologist John Gottman and mathematician James Murray, provide a mathematical model to predict how likely a newlywed couple would be to divorce, with 90 per cent accuracy.
The equations contain variables that account for the dynamics of interactions when the spouses annoy each other and how they respond to each annoyance. It turns out, says Fry, the divorce maths of Gottman and Murray is the same as what some social scientists and mathematicians use to model an arms race resulting in a thermonuclear war towards which the negative interactions of two hostile nations spiral.
“These equations have been shown to be perfectly able of describing what happens between two countries at an arms race,” Fry said in the TED Talk.