WHY I DON'T HAVE A GIRLFRIEND

Based on a talk by Peter Backus at the Warwick Economics Summit

Finding a romantic partner is seen as an important part of anyone's life, but how do you find that special someone? Warwick PhD Student, Peter Backus, tried a novel new approach, attempting to find out just how many suitable girlfriends there were for him in the UK. He used Dr Frank Drake's 1961 equation for estimating the number of communicative civilisations in the Milky Way but altered the variables to suit his criteria. The article gained Backus a lot of media attention, but was his equation a success? Watch his presentation below from the recent Warwick Economics Summit to find out.

During what he tongue-in-cheekly deemed a period of “great loneliness”, PhD student Peter Backus decided to adapt a well-known scientific equation to work out just how many potential girlfriends there are out there for him in the dating pool. This was, rather unhelpfully to his romantic quest, reported on Asylum.com as ‘Math Geek Comes Up With Equation to Explain His Lack of a Girlfriend’.

Backus took Dr Frank Drake’s 1961 equation for estimating the number of communicative civilisations in the Milky Way Galaxy as a starting point. The Drake equation is used to estimate the number of highly evolved civilisations that might exist in our galaxy. Backus used this approach to estimate the number of potential girlfriends in the UK.

As Backus was looking for a female human rather than E.T he had to change the parameters somewhat. Backus’ equation included university-educated women in London between the ages of 24 and 34 who he would find physically attractive. The difficult to quantify variables were if the women would be single, attracted to him and whether they would have things in common, such as his love of ice cream.

The result of the equation was that out of the 60,975,000 people in the UK there are 26 potential girlfriends out there for Backus. The good news is that the odds of him finding a partner are 100 times better than Drake finding a communicative civilisation. The bad news is that no-one yet has discovered a communicative alien civilisation.

The difficult to quantify variables were if the women would be single, attracted to him and whether they would have things in common, such as his love of ice cream.

Other scientists have used the Drake equation for their own romantic ends. In 1999 Tristan Miller at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence used it to work out how many women in his chosen age bracket of 18-25 might be available and find him attractive. He came up with the answer of 15.8655 per cent. This doesn’t sound too bad until he points out that if he went on a blind date every week he would have to date for 3,493 weeks before he found one of the 18,726 women he’s statistically compatible with.

Raymond Francis, a graduate student in space mission design, used the Drake equation to calculate the odds of homosexuals and bisexuals finding a match. As the proportion of people in the population who are gay or bisexual is statistically lower than that of the heterosexual population, the odds of finding a partner are significantly longer too. Also, as Francis points out, the incidence of homo- or bisexuality isn’t the same in both genders, so lesbian women will have a smaller pool of potential partners to choose from than gay men.

Diego Trujillo has used maths to put a more positive spin on the question. He worked out that the probability of having a girlfriend (who doesn’t necessarily have to be life partner potential) is greater than not having a girlfriend. He concludes that guys should not be fussy about who they like and should get as many girls as possible to like them.

Did Backus beat the odds and finally succeed in his quest for love? Watch his 15 minute presentation from the Warwick Economics Summit to find out.

Peter Backus is a final-year PhD student in the University of Warwick’s Department of Economics. He is also a Senior Research Officer at the Third Sector Research Centre. Peter's current research includes issues surrounding charitable giving for overseas development, tax-incentives for charitable giving in the US, and measuring the efficiency of third sector organisations. He has gained widespread acclaim for his paper entitled "Why I don't have a girlfriend?" which has been commented on in both The Metro and The Telegraph newspapers.