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The Mathematics of Lovewas shortlist for the Commonwealth Writer's Best First Book and the Goss First Novel awards, and longlisted for the RNA Book of the Year and Prince Maurice prizes. It has been translated into many languages. It is published by Headline Review in the UK and Commonwealth, and Harper Perennial in the US. Both main characters are finely drawn. The book opens in 1819 as the Peterloo massacre is witnessed by a crippled officer, a survivor of the Napoleonic wars. The story of his wartime traumas, and of his lost and secret love, is interwoven with the story of a rebellious, teenage girl in 1976. She has been parked with an uncle in the crumbling mansion that was once the officer’s home. Both characters are written in the first person, a technically challenging approach that works well in this book. Ms Darwin has also managed to write very convincingly from a male as well as female point of view. 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.
The researchers then plotted the effects the two partners have on each other — empirical evidence for Leo Buscaglia’s timelessly beautiful notion that love is a “dynamic interaction”: El capítulo 6, las matemáticas del sexo, habla de varias encuestas sobre el número de parejas de media que tienen hombres y mujeres, nos presenta la distribución potencial en luegar de la normal (si el número de parejas fuera la estatura, nos cruzaríamos de vez en cuando con gente del tamaño de la torre Eiffel) y nos habla de redes y nodos. The roller coaster of romance is hard to quantify; defining how lovers might feel from a set of simple equations is impossible. But that doesn’t mean that mathematics isn’t a crucial tool for understanding love.I look at relationships. What's different about what I do, compared with most psychologists, is that for me the relationship is the unit, rather than the person. What I focus on is a very ephemeral thing, which is what happens between people when they interact. It's not either person, it's something that happens when they're together. It is like a structure that they're building by the way they interact. And I think of it that way, almost like a fleeting architectural fluid form that people are creating as they talk to each other, as they smile, as they move.
El capítulo 1: ¿qué probabilidades tengo de encontrar pareja? nos presenta la ecuación de Drake adaptada a encontrar pareja en vez de extraterrestres, nos cuenta cómo al estimar tendemos a compensar lo que sobrevaloramos con lo que infravaloramos para llegar a algo que suele tener sentido, al estilo de los problemas de Fermi. Yes, there's enormous predictability. But there's nothing random or hard to understand about it. The principles are very simple. And they're easy to learn, and it makes a difference if you have the right ways to think about this, compared to the wrong ways of thinking about it. There's a lot of stuff that makes sort of logical sense, that seems like it would be right, and turns out to be a complete myth about relationships. We're at the point where we're starting to understand how to have an impact on a societal level, not just on individual cases, but really to change families in our whole culture.
Over a decade ago I began working with James Murray, an amazingly gifted applied mathematician, who in many ways is the father of a new field called mathematical biology. All that theorizing about chaos actually led to new mathematical developments that could model very complex phenomena in biology with very few parameters because the equations were nonlinear. So James and I and his students collaborated and after 4 year of meeting once a week, we were able to get equations for marital interaction as well as physiology and perception, that allowed us to understand our predictions, of what was going to happen to a relationship over time. Using these parameters, we are not only be able to predict, but now understand what people are doing when they affect one another. Where to begin? This work is a great addition to her TED talk about the mathematics of love, which is also fantastic because there are different points of emphasis in the talk as there are here, but you could consider it an introduction or preface to the book! The talk itself introduces much of what is in the book as well. (I won’t go into great detail about what is in the book, but it involves mathematics and love 🤔) And if they're not, if they're fighting destructively, that fetus, that baby is on a different longitudinal course — its neurological development is already handicapped — from the time it's born. The fetal development is really affecting the function of this vagus nerve, the tenth cranial nerve. Now this destructive process that happens to two thirds of all couples can be reversed, just in a 10-hour workshop the parents take in the last trimester of pregnancy. One of the things that's very interesting is that with psychological interventions you can change neurological growth and development, and emotional growth and development in the baby. This makes for more empathetic children — and more empathetic infants as well. Daniel Siegel is beginning to help us understand how this happens, how to integrate attachment theory, relationship science and brain neurophysiology and growth. It's a rich and exciting new field, what Jaak Panksepp calls this "affective neuroscience."
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. A beautifully written, intelligent book… as historically graphic and passionately romantic as Sebastian Faulks's Birdsong.” - Waterstone's Books Quarterly
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That's one puzzle I'm working on — trying to understand violence, and how to help people because it is so common, and it has a huge effect on families, and especially on children, and their development. The story of this novel is about a teenage British girl who for some reason has a mother who doesn't want her around for the summer, as she is off on a romp with her current boyfriend. Said teenager is then shipped off to stay with an uncle on an old English estate. She's met this uncle only once when she was a toddler, and her doddering grandmother who was not supposed to be there, appears on the scene as wel. She is given some old letters from the original owner of the estate and his story is told simultaneously. Interesting premise with a lot of potential. The story also bored me whenever the author wrote about Anna (unless the author chose to disgust me instead). I only found Stephen's story to be more interesting and I liked him better than Anna. Historical romance, Gothic tale and Bildungsroman, Darwin's novel ponders its own processes, mesmerised by the "strips of time" that layer one another in a place. The narrative centres on the powerful nostalgia of a house in time, within a landscape that records the passage of generations...ambitious in concept and design. Its canvas is immense... the narrative of photography is electrifying. Darwin creates an imaginative language capable of suggesting the quality of the uncanny present in the humblest snapshot.” - The Independent
At that point we know, from Loren Rowling's work, that people start secreting adrenalin, and then they get into a state of diffuse physiological arousal (or DPA) , so their heart is beating faster, it's contracting harder, the arteries start getting constricted, blood is drawn away from the periphery into the trunk, the blood supply shuts down to the gut and the kidney, and all kinds of other things are happening — people are sweating, and things are happening in the brain that create a tunnel vision, one in which they perceive everything as a threat and they react as if they have been put in great danger by this conversation. In his sublime definition of love, playwright Tom Stoppard painted the grand achievement of our emotional lives as “knowledge of each other, not of the flesh but through the flesh, knowledge of self, the real him, the real her, in extremis, the mask slipped from the face.” But only in fairy tales and Hollywood movies does the mask slip off to reveal a perfect other. So how do we learn to discern between a love that is imperfect, as all meaningful real relationships are, and one that is insufficient, the price of which is repeated disappointment and inevitable heartbreak? Making this distinction is one of the greatest and most difficult arts of the human experience — and, it turns out, it can be greatly enhanced with a little bit of science. Then we are also finding that if we intervene early, and do preventative intervention, our effects are much bigger, and we have an impact not only on the couple, and changing their longitudinal course, in a dramatic way, in not a very long time, but we can also have an impact on the emotional development of their children. We're following those children — we're now studying children whose parents went only to a two-day workshop, and their babies are now turning three years old, and we'll know at the end of this year whether this emotional developmental change continues and the children are in a dramatically different trajectory than kids whose parents didn't take the workshop.I can put up with edgy elements to a story if they are put in the proper light and show the true duality of human nature. I can handle the fact that this world ain't always pretty. But this was just cheap entertainment of the worst kind. It is an insult to Jane Austen that the author read Emma to try to get a feel for the dialogue of the day. The dialogue sounded forced and out of place. These are big, unwieldy themes, but Emma Darwin wrestles with them in such a delicate and subtle way that the book never becomes tedious or self-absorbed. She builds layer on layer of emotion and history until, like a photographic print emerging from its chemical bath, the final picture is revealed… Everyone is, at the core, vulnerable, their happiness bittersweet and fleeting but nevertheless priceless. Darwin has somehow managed to express this basic human condition without succumbing to bleakness. A real achievement.” - The Times Similar to Ian McEwan's Atonement in its compelling, literary blend of war history and romantic relationships... Darwin will be an author to watch.” - Library Journal How do you know when you've found the one? The answer may lie in a simple equation' -- The Sunday Times
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