The Mathematics of Love: Patterns, Proofs, and the Search for the Ultimate Equation (Ted Books)

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Anna is a marvelous creation, a sort of every girl with no particular virtues or faults, but always compelling and believable. Her emotional credibility is evident in the voice Darwin has found for her… The characters who surround her are also so wonderfully rendered the reader can smell and feel them… beautifully rendered.” - Los Angeles Times It's a lovely lush story and great to listen to, especially Stephen's correspondence with Lucy. I loved Anna learning about photography and playing with light, but I was kind of ambivalent about where Anna's relationship with Theo went - and I wasn't sure that it resolved enough for me to be happy with it. The Mathematics of Love is a daring debut novel that forces the reader to confront both the horrors of history and the destructiveness of misplaced passion. But its overriding theme is deliverance, as the two main characters face their troubled pasts and are freed from the ghosts that have haunted them… Emma Darwin's prose is golden and convincing. This book is an addictive, engaging foray into historical fiction that leaves the reader believing in the art of perspective and the redemptive power of love.” - Daily Express

Two barrels accounted for two rabbits and I sent the dogs to retrieve them. Following at my leisure, I was surprised to see them swerve away from their task towards the hedge. Then Titus raised his head and set to barking. A bravura and compelling feat of storytelling, enlivened by convincing detail and voices, as well as by serious reflection on the nature of memory, history and reportage.” - Publishing News Once again, like Head Start, it looks like families are changing in a major way, in terms of social class, from the bottom up. And the government is thinking that when these scientifically based programs will teach social skills to lower-income couples, couples on welfare, that they'll learn and they'll be better. They'll learn from what the middle class is doing. But I think the major learning's going to come the other way because many of the couples we have worked with who have been through a history of slavery, forcible breakups of families by slaveholders, bad schooling, racism, poverty, unequal employment opportunities, bad parenting, criminals as their only successful role models, incarceration, drug addiction, and alcoholism, and violence, and some of these couples are still together. Many of these people who have triumphed despite it all are amazingly articulate when my wife talks to them, and helps them to reveal their highly articulate wisdom. We are seeing a new kind of commitment on the part of men, and on the part of women supporting the men, and who are staying with them in spite of incarceration and addiction. It's breathtaking, because it's a real existential change. Science comes into the study of families and relationships because a scientist always admits to profound ignorance, doesn't presume to know about these things, takes this ignorance and goes to the people and observes them in situations that are vitally important — when people are having dinner, when they meet at the end of the day, when they are in the bedrooms cuddling, when they're having sex, when they're interacting with their babies — in these very important moments, a scientist without preconceptions observes and tries to understand — interviews people, measures their physiology, and tries to get at their inner experience. And then creates mathematical models that provide theoretical understanding of all these processes.has a real flavour of its own that will grip you to the end… An accomplished, vividly realised debut novel.” - Marie Claire An impressive first novel. The stories . . . fascinate in Darwin’s ambitious, alluring tale.” - People I've been working on a couple of puzzles right now. One is trying to understand couple violence, and how violence occurs between two people who supposedly love each other, and have a contract to nurture and protect one another, and to support one another's dreams in a real and meaningful way. Violence occurs so frequently in relationships in this country. Estimates by Leonard are that 36 percent of newlyweds in the United States have had a violent fight before they get married. How does violence happen in an ordinary relationship? And is all violence the same? At what point can you do something about it; is there a point of no return, where you can't do anything about it? And it must be very ordinary, and so there must be a pattern to it that's understandable. 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. 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 🤔)

The lesson plan is divided into several tasks. It starts with a short exercise on phrases and collocations connected with love and relationships. Students have to match such phrases as tie the knot, drift apart or pop the question with their meanings. Additionally, this activity is followed by a short discussion which introduces the topic to students. VIDEO AND DISCUSSION However, some of the interactions in the 20th century sections would today be given the label of ‘abuse’, even though they are written with immense tenderness through the eyes of a willing ‘victim’. That conflict was the only discomfort that remained as I finished a thoroughly satisfying read.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. All of which are really great conditions for running away from a predator, or fighting aggressively to protect the tribe. And survival. So when you have less blood in the periphery you create what Malcolm Gladwell calls a bloodless armor that lets you strike without really bleeding too much, or run away without hurting yourself too much. But in the context of a discussion with somebody you love clearly this DPA is not very functional. And we found in fact that physiological arousal is one of the best predictors of what happens to that relationship. That's why it predicts. 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. 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