UFO Info Week-End

But it’s tough to dispute because hey we’ve all watched Pretty Woman

“But it’s tough to dispute, because, hey, we’ve all watched Pretty Woman.”For those searching for a soulmate by pulling in bars, Cresswell moves on to the “rule of 12 bonks”, which she calls “my personal favourite”. “But with love we don’t want to be unromantic, so we say ‘No, I’ll know when I find The One,’ which is completely counter-intuitive.”In fact, she questions the belief that there is “one” at all: “The maths suggests that there are multiple people you could be happy with, and the idea of a soulmate is disputed if you look at social Darwinistic theory,” she says, laughing. “It’s an interesting problem because divorce rates are getting higher and higher. If you bought a DVD player that someone told you had a 50 per cent chance of breaking down, you would ask your friends what they do and take advice,” she explains. People who get out the negativity straight away do better because they have higher standards, and see themselves as fighting for their marriages.

When members of the couple keep giving in, then they are lowering their standards.”Moving on, Cresswell explains how maths can help in hunting for a partner. Despite her day job as a lecturer at the University of South Wales, the 30-year-old’s quirky humour and unconventional life are more reminiscent of a Sex and the City character than a stuffy academic. She combines her research and teaching with writing an advice column in a women’s magazine and speaking engagements worldwide.But Dr Cresswell got the idea to apply maths to romance by accident. “I came across these fascinating equations that used maths to figure out how much one should compromise in a marriage, and was blown away by how many people asked about them,” she says. She explains that the psychologists John Gottman and Catherine Swanson watched newly-wed couples interact for 15 minutes, and observed their reaction to each other to determine the likelihood of their staying together.

The results, she says, were surprising, and “have had a big impact on how psychologists view marital theory.” They found that, while some people expressed negativity as soon as they felt it, others held their anger in and “empathised” for as long as possible with their mates.She adds: “We have always heard in the past that empathy is the best method, but they found that people who hold in their anger and rationalise their partner’s behaviour by saying something like ‘Oh, it’s OK that he didn’t put the cap back on the toothpaste, because he had a hard childhood’ are much more likely to get divorced than those who get their anger out there and then. Most women’s idea of a scientific approach to love does not extend beyond the horoscope pages. But a mathematician, Clio Cresswell PhD, believes the answers to some of the big questions lie in mind-bending equations. After years of research, she is explaining her theories on finding the perfect relationship in her new book, Mathematics and Sex.
“Mathematics is all about patterns, whether it’s in the stock-market, society or in your bedroom,” she says. People who had regular sessions of treatment were no less disabled 12 months later than those who were simply advised to stay active.But there was some benefit from the treatment. Those who had the physiotherapy felt better, even though, by any objective measurement, they were no better.Interestingly, the Nottingham researchers do not consider this an adequate justification. The tough-minded response is to say, as a BMJ editorial almost does, that we should abandon physiotherapy for back pain on the NHS.While we on this side of the Atlantic balk at providing a treatment that is “ineffective”, even if it makes patients feel better, the Canadians seem happy to give steroids to children on the grounds that it makes their parents feel better – even though it is not strictly necessary.Here we have a clash of attitudes.