Left: a 2009 Flickr-style, heart icon depiction of a mathematical formulation attempt at an equation of love. [6] Right: a modern day Bergman-Goethe-Adler reaction style equation of love: that of a human combination reaction, i.e. a time-accelerated depiction of act of falling in love (relationship formation) as a chemical equation, specifically a male-female reaction (see: human chemical reaction theory). |
♂ + ♀ → ♂≡♀
A two demons equals one angel love equation, representative of the good (natural) and evil (unnatural) aspects of relationships, viewed as types of neutralizing reactions. |
A 2011 rustic algebra-style equation of love. [33] |
“Whether two molecules will bind is determined by the free energy change of the interaction, composed of both enthalpic and entropic terms.”
Differential change State change Name dG < 0 ΔG < 0 Lewis inequality for a natural process (or spontaneous process), one in which the change will occur naturally or spontaneously and in which useful energy is obtainable from the system. dG > 0 ΔG > 0 Lewis inequality for an unnatural process (or non-spontaneous process), one in which useful energy is required to be supplied to the given system to bring about the desired change.
State change Name ΔG < 0 Lewis inequality for a natural process (or spontaneous process), one in which the change will occur naturally or spontaneously and in which useful energy is obtainable from the system. ΔG ≪ 0 Lewis inequality for a "very" natural process (or "very" spontaneous process), one in which the change will occur naturally or spontaneously and in which useful energy is obtainable from the system and in which the final state (bonded couple) will be greatly favored over that of the initial state (unattached couple) and the existence of the so-called strongly "loving" marriage will ensue.
Left: the 1996 film adaption of German polymath Johann Goethe's 1809 Elective Affinities, which uses the equations of Swedish chemist Torbern Bergman's 1775 physical chemistry A Dissertation on Elective Attractions, to explain love and relationships. |
See main: Reaction decipherment; Equation deciphermentIn 1796, German polyintellect Johann Goethe began to pioneer human chemical reaction theory, in terms of the forces of chemical affinities A operating on and between people, affinity being the precursor concept to free energy, who used the chemical equations of Swedish chemist Torbern Bergman's 1775 physical chemistry textbook A Dissertation on Elective Attractions, to show, through thirty-six chapters of a novella, that human relationships are purely and simply "chemical reactions", or affinity reactions (as they were called in Goethe's day), whereby the actions and processes involved in the state (initial state and final state) of love and human actions revolving about this powerful notion are quantified by measures of the force of affinity. [2] The following is are screenshots from the 1996 film adaptation of the famous chapter four, of his his 1809 novella Elective Affinities, wherein the gist of this theory is explained:
Love = f{human elective affinities}
“Crebillon … treats the passions like playing cards, that one can shuffle, play, reshuffle, and play again, without their changing at all. There is no trace of the delicate, chemical affinity, through which they attract and repel each other, reunite, neutralize [each other], separate again and recover.”
The 1808 Goethe "love thought experiment" according to which German polymath Johann Goethe contemplated the story of a hero simultaneously in love with four women, and had to turn to the equations of physical chemistry, affinity chemistry in particular, to explain the situation. See also: Thims thought experiment (1995). |
the changes in love, for this chemical reaction, are quantified by sum forces of elective affinity preferences, or chemical affinity (modern sense), of the three people involved in the reaction. In modern terms, this ‘single elective affinity reaction’ is written as such:
♂♀1 + ♀2 → ♂♀2 + ♀1
An 1834 rendition of Honore Balzac explaining to his fictional wife why the chemist, who has an understanding of human chemical theory, has a deeper sense and "feeling" of love then the general romantic person. |
See main: Balzac feelings and affinity dialogueIn 1834, French realism novelist Honore Balzac, in his The Quest of the Absolute (La Recherche de l’Absolu), has Balthazar Claes, a chemist, debate with Josephine, his wife, about the underlying moral of the romantic belief that preoccupation with science atrophies the normal emotions that sustain personal relations and social responsibilities; the main dialogue of which is as follows:
Josephine: “Believe me, Balthazar, nature made us to feel; and though you will have it that we are nothing but an electrical mechanism, your gases and etherealized matter will never account for our power of foreseeing the future.
Balthazar: “Yes, by means of affinities. The power of vision which makes the poet and the deductive power of the man of science are both based on visible affinities, though they are impalpable and imponderable, so that ordinary minds look on them ‘moral phenomena’, but in reality they are purely physical. Every dreamer of dreams sees and draws deductions from what he sees. Unluckily, such affinities as these are too rare, and the indications are too slight to be submitted to analysis and observation.”
Josephine: “And this”, she said, coming closer for a kiss, to put chemistry, which had returned so inopportunely at her question, to flight again, “is to be an affinity?”
(add)
A = – ΔG
Left: a 2011 equation of love tattoo on the inner bicep of a Tumblr user woman named Chrissy. [32] Right: a 2009 index card “solve for n” style equation of love, entitled “The Equation of Love Perception”, indicating that both "time", spent working, in transit, and in affairs, and "imagination" are factors. [35] |
Love = Sex + Friendship
Bazargan's equation of love | ||
Demand or need | The capacity of consumption or total need | Available assets [items] (Sexual inventory?) |
American applied mathematician Steven Strogatz's 1988 article on differential equations and love. [1] |
See main: Mathematics of loveOne of the first to begin to describe love in mathematical terms was American mathematician Steven Strogatz who in his 1988 article "Love Affairs and Differential Equations" discussed his unusual teaching approach to introducing students to the subject of systems of coupled ordinary differential equations, by formulating hypothetical differential equations to describe the love/hate ratio functions (see: Gottman stability ratio) for the interactions between William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. [16]
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Left: a graphical way of depicting love as an equation. [7] Right: 2008 integral of love tattoo, said to mean: “all values, from zero to infinity, are less than love.” [11] |
M + F → M-F
sG = sH – TsS
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A 2007 T-shirt love as type of mathematical / chemical equation: [9] | A mathematics humor "sex equal fun" derivation and T-shirt. |
“Science today cannot give us an exact chemical equation to what is love, or even tell us if one exists.”
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“Chemical Romance” by Cacao Productions (17 Feb 09) | "Love | Equation of" by HumanChemistry101 (03 Mar 09) |
or
Image from Jacob Leachman's 2017 blog (Ѻ) on the thermodynamics of love, wherein he gives Gibbs energy as the defining equation of love. |
When you’ll fall in love
Falling in love is likely a form of phase change (see: social phase). You’re entering into a (hopefully) synergistic bond with another that adds to you on many levels. The Gibbs energy analysis in other chapters shows that phase change spontaneously occurs when the Gibbs energy after the event is less than the Gibbs energy before:G = U + Pv – TS
This is promoted by:
U: simplification of values or descending to primal/familial values as a pair compared to individuals.
P: reduced stress after the change.
v: reduced volume, or increased density analogous to living together.
T: likelihood of increased resources after the event. (Dowry?)
S: becoming more empathic and understanding more things, including your partner, in more ways.
So if you find yourself only wanting to do one thing with someone, but are connecting with them on many levels, you run a chance of falling in love. But beware, empathy like entropy is irreversible, it’ll be tough to forget someone if it doesn’t work out. What’s also comforting is that we can fall in love again and again. At the higher v-Memes there is a multitude of ways to synergize and hook up. Remember too that these properties are all connected by a complex surface of state and it is possible for phase change to happen despite some of the properties moving in opposite directions. But it generally holds, and vice versa should you ever want to prevent love.
American young adult fiction author John Green's 2006 award-winning book An Abundance of Katherines (left), and followup 2008 edition (right), which tells the story of Colin Singleton, a child prodigy who tries to turn his 19 failed encounters with girls named Katherine into a formula that will predict the outcome of all relationships. |
"When it comes to relationships, Colin Singleton's type is girls named Katherine. And when it comes to girls named Katherine, Colin is always getting dumped. Nineteen times, to be exact. On a road trip miles from home, this anagram-happy, washedup child prodigy has ten thousand dollars in his pocket, a bloodthirsty feral hog on his trail, and an overweight, Judge Judy–loving best friend riding shotgun—but no Katherines. Colin is on a mission to prove The Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability, which he hopes will predict the future of any relationship, avenge Dumpees everywhere, and finally win him the girl. Love, friendship, and a dead Austro-Hungarian archduke add up to surprising and heart-changing conclusions in this ingeniously layered comic novel about reinventing oneself."
A synopsis of the Green equation of love. | A circa 2010 tattoo of the Green equation of love on someone's forearm. |
A 2008 artistic recreation of the themes and content, e.g. anagrams, mathematics, orbitals, some type of min-max graphical method, etc., of An Abundance of Katherines. [26] |
Q. Is this book like Looking for Alaska?
A. Well, yes and no. Katherines is more of a comic novel (for instance, no one dies), but I still like writing about smart kids and friendship and figuring out what if anything matters.
Q. This book has a lot of anagrams and footnotes and also some math. What's up with that?
A. The only way I can answer that question is to say that I don't think you have to like footnotes or anagrams to like Katherines. And I SWEAR you don't have to like math.
Q. It's not just cleverness for the sake of cleverness, is it?
A. I hope not. Certainly I've never taken a lot of stock in being clever.
Q. Colin believes that there are two kinds of people in this world: Dumpers and dumpees. Which kind are you?
A. I am a dumpee. In fact, before I got married, I was dumped 53 times. But never by a girl named Katherine.
Q. Is what why you picked the name Katherine?
A. Well, that had something to do with it. Also because Katherines is a great word for anagramming (it contains, after all, both heart and tear), and because it is a very common name.
Green's "dumber/dumpee dichotomy" shown on a bell curve, according to which he says the majority of people are lumped somewhere in the middle. |
A. When I was writing the book I actually decided to sit down and figure out approximately how many Katherines there are currently living in Chicago between the ages of 16 and 18 (which I figured to be the basic pool from which Colin could draw girlfriends).
It's a very inexact science, but if you look at the frequency with which kids in America were named Katherine between 1988 and 1990, and then you look at the percentage of Cook County residents who are between the ages of 16 and 18, the numbers indicate that there are something like 275 16-18-year-old Katherines living in or very near the city of Chicago, and that's not even counting the 3 million people who live in the suburbs. So the real question is: How did Colin manage to date ONLY 19 of them?
Left: a John Green fan 2011 "equation overlay style" book cover submission, showing Green's equation of love in the background. [27] Right: a 2012 novel entitled Equation for Love by Fae Sutherland the blurb of which is: Sex + money (shouldn't) = lovewith the tagline: "but since when does the heart follow any laws but its own?" [36] |
“Dr. Finch tells him to publish, and so he has renewed interest in old research, having decided to publish one of his eleventh-grade papers he started at nine years old, "The Mathematics of Friendship," with an addendum. A publishing company has turned his work into a classic book for those not mathematically inclined, while opting for a title with more pizazz, "Friendship, As Easy as Pi." Charlie takes joy in the belief that this book will allow his thoughts to reach a much wider audience than before.
The cover of the fictional 2007 TV-land book The Attraction Equation, for an episode of the popular TV show Numb3rs, described as being about the "the mathematics of friendship", written by child prodigy Charles Eppes. [22] |
Left: with marriage viewed as a human chemical reaction, the factoid of 43% of marriages ending at 15-years, i.e. divorce rate, is a measure of the extent of reaction. Right: a Julius Davidson (1919) and or Christopher Hirata (2000) type depiction of human pairings as Le Chatelier type equilibrium reactions that adjust depending on reaction conditions. |
See main: Queer chemistryThe first to outline and discuss chemical reaction reaction or chemical equation formulations for homosexual relationships was American astrophysicist Christopher Hirata ("The Physics of Relationships", 2000) and the first textbook section on subject homosexuality in the context of chemistry and thermodynamics was the "LGBT/Queer chemistry" chapter section of American electrochemical engineer Libb Thims' 2007 textbook Human Chemistry. [19]
Left: an alchemy symbol stylized chemical equations for homosexual love. Right: the 2000 song "U + Me = Us" by the boy band 2ge+her. |
Mx + Mx → MxMxSimilarly, about 1 percent of the general female population are homosexual in mating behavior. In these types of reactions, two female human molecules will form a mated union:
Fy + Fy → FyFy
See also: Thermodynamics humorRelated to the subject of the “equation of love” is the popular so-called ‘mathematical proof’ that a woman equals problems, which is often given as a joke-answer to the premise that, supposedly, one can reduce love to a mathematical equation. It is difficult to track down the origin of this; online versions date several years, and the actual joke seems to have originated several decades back, but it amounts to a five step proof, with alternative variations in step four:
Step Axiom Origin Equation 1. Women are a product of time and money 2. Time is money 3. (substitution of step 1 eq. into step 1 eq.) 4. Money is the root of all evil Bible
(Timothy, 6:10)Money is the root of all problems 5. (substitution of step 4 eq. into step 3 eq.) A "love > money" equation spray painted onto a public wall (22 July 2010): Love equation, graffiti artist (and place) unknown; alluding to the intimate and generally unwritten relation that exists between money (wealth) and love. [29]
Step Axiom Origin Equation 1. Love is a product of time and energy Libb Thims (2007) 2. Energy and mass are equivalent Albert Einstein (1905) 3. Love is a force Empedocles (400BC) 4. (substitution of step 3 eq. and step 2 eq. into step 1 eq.)
which leads one to the humorously conclusion that time is a function of the force of love divided by the product of the change in the mass of one's connected relationships and the speed of light squared. Another popular math-themed joke about love goes something along the lines of: [18]
“Sex is a matter of math: Add a woman. Subtract her clothes. Divide her legs. And Multiply.”
See main: Physics of love; Thermodynamics of loveA humorous particle physics of love poem is:
Bosons are red
Mesons are blue
I like to classify
Hadrons with you
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Two swans forming a heart shape, both a common historical symbol of love. Modern symbols, however, involve chemical symbols: bonding brackets “{“, reaction arrows “→”, reaction conditions, i.e. in water “∇” or heated “Δ”, individual chemical species, A, B, c., etc., attached species, Ab, Ac, etc., and movements and reactions of species due to affinity tendencies (affinity reactions), depicted diagrammatically. |
A 2010 equation overlay depiction of Australian mathematician Tony Dooley's so-called ‘fiancée formula’ equation of love. [34] |
1. Set out the last possible age by which you want to get married (e.g. age 39). Call this number 'n' for age at which marriage is a necessity.
2. Decide the earliest age at which you'll start to consider women as potential wife material (e.g. age 20 onwards). This age becomes 'p' or age at marriage becomes a possibility.
American well-being theorist Chip Conley's 2012 emotional equation of love. [30] |
Left: poster for the 2011 play Complex Numbers written by Canadian playwright Nadine Thornhill and her husband mathematician Phil Eisen, in which the main character attempts to derive equations for love. [17] Right: a 2010 “Love vs. Distance” theory equation of love, where the love symbol represents the amount of love between the couple at an instantaneous time, X represents the distance between the couple, and C is a constant; according to which at a high value of X, the couple is far apart and love decreases, whereas at a low value of X, couples are nearer and love increases. [38] |
Joy = Love – Fear
Love = Joy + Fear
"I've always believed in numbers. In the equations and logics that lead to reason; but after a lifetime of such pursuits I ask, what truly is logic? Who decides reason? My quest has take me through the physical, the metaphysical, the delusional and back, and I have made the most important discovery of my career... the most important discovery of my life. It is only in the mysterious equations of love that any logical reasons can be found. I'm only here tonight because of you. You are the only reason I am... you are all my reasons."
Left: a short 2007 film entitled “Kirby and the Love Equation”, about a 13-year-old boy genius named Kirby who spends five minutes each day attempting to derive an equation that will predict the odds the older girl he likes will go for him, Written by Brandon Goodwin, Nate Black and Grant Heugel. Right: the scene from the 2001 film A Beautiful Mind, wherein John Nash (starring Russell Crowe) gives his fictional Nobel Prize acceptance speech and mentions the "mysterious equation of love", something he never seems to have done in reality. |
“I've made the most important discovery of my life. It's only in the mysterious equation of love that any logical reasons can be found.”– Erich Fromm, German-born American social psychologist
The following, below left, is 2013 The Times “equation of love” like image, showing: heart overlap, which may be representative of human molecular orbital theory, a martini squared, representative of alcohol's ability to lower inhibitions, thus giving wiggle room at the activation energy barrier, a reaction arrow, representative of transition state, an inequality sign (≥), which in the direction shown, would seem to be quantitatively indicative of the premise that good (natural) loves have greater Gibbs free energy in the initial state (left side of inequality sign) than final state (right side of inequality sign), some type of neurochemical, etc., for a book review article on Graeme Simsion’s new book The Rosie Project, about a guy with Asperger’s syndrome named Don Tillman who wants to find the “Perfect Wife” via questionnaires and DNA samples, a fictional spinoff, it seems, of recent non-fictional “Sweaty T-shirt study” based science-based dating sites: (Ѻ) (Ѻ)
A 2013 The Times “equation of love” like image showing: heart overlap. A circa 2011 Dr. Love cartoon, by artist Jaime Huxtable (Ѻ), trying to find the formula or equation for love. (Ѻ)
The following is a recent 2013 math, history, chemistry, art tale on the: what is love? query: Right: A 2010 DeviantArt.com (computer modified) rendition of two people discussing a mathematical-like poetic style love equation. [15] In realty, to note, by virtue of tendencies of Beckhap's law, the probability of a physically "hot" blond being able to write such an equation on a dry erase board would be very rare.
A 2010, Beckhap's law themed, equation infographic of love created by Audrey Fukuman, representing the differences in how men and women rate each other when looking for a potential mate. [8]
“No poet, ancient or modern, not even Shakespeare or Dante, has more clearly divined or expressed with more profound utterance the nature of love than Emerson, though the poems in which he has expressly dealt with that passion are few. To be a poet is to be a lover, and the feminine Muse is but the unknown quantity in the poet's algebra, by which he expresses now this element, now that, in the indeterminate equation of love. Or, as Emerson better announces this mystery: ‘The sense of the world is short; Long and various the report — To love and be beloved’.”— Franklin Sanborn (1879), “The Homes and Haunts of Emerson” [39]
“Polymerization + Love = You”— Clifford Pickover (2016), Great Chain of Being Image Tweet (Ѻ), Nov 26
2009 humorous take on a love equation: in which a man plus a woman times five beers equals love. [10] | A 2011 ShutterStock.com rendition of a male plus female equals love chalkboard equation of love. [14] |
A man plus woman plus coffee equals love equation, alluding to the underlying chemical-amphetamine nature of love. |
A 2010 love equation poster. [37] |