TO THE WISE, LIFE IS A PROBLEM, TO THE FOOL A SOLUTION”. MARC AURELIUS BY DR OLGA ROH, LADY INCHDREWER
Research on these topics is as endless as the wisecracks and advice of soothsayers and fortune-tellers with the qualifications of Nostradamus.The timeline of those who have tried to understand and explain relationships is fascinating; starting with the wandering minstrels and troubadours of old William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy and perhaps most recently rappers, we have not until now been able to overcome many burning questions. In fact, these topics are used for studies at serious scientific level in academic circles, and they have a verifiable justification. I was surprised to discover the mathematical love formulas (just imagine this?!) developed by a very serious and recognised academic, a highly regarded mathematician of our “age of reason”, Dr Pavel Alexandrov, who is a distinguished Professor at the Academy of Sciences of the Russian Federation. And hear, hear! These formulas are not inspired by voodoo or practitioners of magic from times of ancient binding witchcraft, which were all about to “bind” people up to different outcomes in personal affairs related to love, and even revenge. LOVE TRIANGLE Both John and Jack propose to Mary.Whom would Mary prefer to marry? Life presents Mary the rather tricky situation of having to make the right choice. And here women often solve complex mathematical problems faster than men, without even realising it. And in this respect, as Pavel Aleksandrov assures us, the female mind and logic are akin to great mathematicians such as Poincaré. And everything is simple: we build a matrix of relations; we then find the values and vectors of this matrix. An analysis of the vector corresponding to the maximum value makes it possible to uniquely solve Mary’s problem! If this vector leans towards the "Mary and Jack" plane, then Mary should marry Jack and vice versa if it leans towards the "John and Mary" plane. Should the vector be grounded within the either-or plane of "John or Jack", then Mary just needs to wait.That is, if they are both worthy of her. Which means the love triangle is on a level to Mary that doesn't allow for a quick decision.This is purely a mathematical calculation. When a woman is pressed by a life situation, she is prepared to make that fateful choice even if she has never studied mathematics.This is the result of her routine brain activity in making the decision. WHICH MARRIAGE IS THE STRONGEST? Marriages are known to be concluded for love, for convenience, for sex.They can be carnal, and sometimes truly unequal. It turns out that, from the point of view of mathematics, the most stable marriages tend to be the ones which had initially been concluded for convenience, but on the important condition that the calculation was correct for both parties... What if it's wrong? Divorce usually follows, which, of course, is preceded by marriage. In other words, and excuse my macabre tone here, marriages breed divorces. But then again, divorce breeds marriage. However, divorce also breeds divorce! And this is significant, since some divorced people act in society as free radicals - hello again, mathematics! - they destroy other people's families.Therefore, avoid friendships with divorced people if you want your family not to fall apart! Along the way, we must note that here, too, women intuitively choose the side of mathematically calculated logic and avoid introducing their divorced girlfriends to their beloved spouse. One never knows. THE CHALLENGE OF HAPPINESS "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy. Happiness is a feeling and a state of complete satisfaction to which we strive in life, but we do not all achieve. Nevertheless, to be happy is a fundamental human desire. It is impossible for a person to understand whether he is happy if he has never been unhappy. Here we apply the same statistical test as for marriage and divorce, since over time even the happiest and most successful person will suffer misfortune.This is the very test that makes it clear whether a person is happy or not at the moment and why it is necessary to be unhappy periodically for therapeutic purposes. LOVE AND HATRED "Love your neighbour as yourself." Matthew 22:39 What is the legacy of this quote? The conclusion of the Philistine would be to "love yourself." The conclusion of a practicing mathematician would be: “If you hate someone, you first of all hate yourself and are thereby self-destructive.” “I am ready to subscribe to these words with full responsibility,” says Pavel Aleksandrov. Let us figure out this dilemma. Love is as strong a feeling as hate, but with one main difference: love is creative, whereas hatred is destructive. They say there is but one step from love to hate. But from hate to love the distance is insurmountably large. Since love is creative, one must strive for it, avoiding hatred. People who feel hatred for another person sometimes do not realise that they hate themselves first.There is a saying that when someone is in love the Lord kisses him on the top of his head, making him the happiest person in the world. DON-JUANISM Lovemaking is not love; the former does not necessarily have anything to do with the latter. Don Juanism is the phenomenon of a heterosexual male looking for as many sexual encounters as possible, sometimes keeping meticulous notes on his exploits. If you look at it from a strictly mathematical point of view, Don Juanism shows a certain disdain, if not hatred for women, and not love for all of them, as one may be led to believe.
It is unlikely or at least very rare that a man feels love for a woman of easy virtue. He unfortunately more likely despises her. Hatred comes into its own - we are talking about a man who has not been loved in his life and who does not love himself! So we are back to proving the previous theorem from the mathematical model of love and hate: hate that breeds love is almost impossible! In mathematics, in this case, the coefficient responsible for the transition from hatred to love is said to tend towards zero. ADVERSE CIRCUMSTANCES "For never was a story of more woe than this of Juliet and her Romeo..." Romeo and Juliet,William Shakespeare The problem is formulated as follows: do the external circumstances of the belligerent clans of Montague and Capulet influence the depth of feelings of Romeo and Juliet from the point of view of mathematics? This problem is similar to the previously mentioned problem of Mary’s love triangle, the rigorous solution of which leads to the conclusion that external circumstances do not affect the feelings of Romeo and Juliet! In other words, if your feelings are influenced by external circumstances, then these feelings are NOT REAL! They are ephemeral.This means that these young people would have to look for another object of love and not waste valuable time. Quintessentially, love ought not to depend on external circumstances and barriers, that is, as long as we are talking about true love. So, you need to take care of a different object of attention. Let’s remember though, that the most stable marriages tend to be, according to statistics, those where both parties benefit and keep on benefiting from the marriage long after the wedding day. THE CHALLENGE OF DEVELOPMENT Prosper Mérimée opens the curtain of his novel “Carmen” by bestowing on his criminal, promiscuous but devilishly seductive and eponymous main character the knowledge of her imminent death and that of her former lover José through fortune-telling. Carmen decided to live in such a way as not to miss anything, transferring her passion to the brave and glorious bullfighter Escamillo. How this story ended, everyone knows.What to say about predictions of fate? Are they not absurd, are they necessary from a mathematical point of view? According to the mathematician, prediction is developmental. Development can be different: spiritual, moral, intellectual or financial. The tasks themselves have a linear formulation associated with the speed of development. It is an unstable process and because of this, development should not be too fast, otherwise the process becomes spasmodic, which can lead to catastrophically inaccurate consequences. Decision-making should bring about a qualitative improvement in the starting position. If this does not happen, the degradation process takes effect. In contrast to development, degradation is very stable indeed.A kind of inertia. In other words, the development process is a predictive process, in contrast to the random process, which is associated with unpredictable behaviour. Predictability and the logic of a situation’s development are present in a good number of works of world literature. One striking example is Honoré de Balzac's The Wild Ass's Skin (“La peau de chagrin”). Good and evil, war and peace, a race to the death. These contrasts are well displayed in mathematics. All conflicts and wars fit into the model of mathematical oppositions. Political scientists happily repeat the following downtrodden phrase: he who owns the information, owns the world. In reality this is a grave mistake, for information is knowledge of the past and facts about which we only know that they were used at some point in the past. In fact, a deep understanding of the process is important in order to be able to predict it without fortune-tellers. Only he who knows the future owns the world!
ABOUT REVENGE Revenge is a dish best served cold. It it is popularly believed that this phrase was coined by Choderlos de Laclos (1741-1803) for his 1782 novel Dangerous Liaisons: "La vengeance est un plat qui se mange froid".Yet you will not find this witty phrase in the text of the novel and in reality it is even older than de Laclos. I do think that it would be terribly naughty of us to talk about revenge with our good-natured professor. That said, Pavel Alexandrov has a righteous streak, as we shall see next. I will quote our professor one last time: “In the life of a teacher, you get to deal with both tricky and funny situations. In principle, I do not like to punish lazy students. But I do not like their laziness. I regularly have to prepare examinations for my mathematics students and to my surprise I have a few students I never see in class suddenly attend my exams.They include daughters, girlfriends and spouses of super wealthy people from the famous Rublevskoe Chausse [a Moscow street littered with tremendously expensive bits of real estate].These girls look as though they had just stepped off the most glamorous catwalks. I suspect that a number of them not once attended my classes. I try to make my exams really interesting, so I use examples that can be applied to real life when I prepare my problems that my students get asked touch on the most burning topics of our lives. “Oh, in vain did we not attend math classes!” is what I have sometimes heard my absentee students exclaim. This is the most pleasant kind of revenge for me! You missed a fascinating and an almost universally applicable chapter in the book of human knowledge. Live a whole century long, learn a century, otherwise you will die a fool!” And at this point, lesson learned: “Make mathematics your friend, as since Galileo Galilei we know - the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics”!
About Olga Roh, with a PhD from the University Bern, she is a linguist, journalist, literary critic, psychologist, and fashion designer. Olga worked many years as a model for top fashion houses and became a known Swiss model. In 2007 she founded ROHMIR fashion house and acts as its creative director. For more information see her social handle @rohmir_