By Megha Lakha
“Honestly, we should run the stats of the probability of a high school relationship making it to marriage,” Ms. Howard said.
Ms. Howard was trying to conjure up ideas about two very different topics: math and Valentine’s Day.
After all. math is all about concrete answers, statistics, measurability, blah, blah, blah… but love is about spontaneity and unpredictability.
You might never associate the two things with each other but it turns out they’ve got a lot in common.
First, there is the obvious pairing of math and love’s relationship: actual math. Mr Amar was quick to mention how romantic relationships are often mirrored by mathematical graphs.
“Things that grow quickly and may have a limit, like some parallel lines can be faded lovers that never meet; they’re always in each other’s orbit but never get together,” Mr. Amar said, showing me a graph on his laptop. “This graph touches on one point, so as the lovers get together, they have this moment, and it’s exciting, and then they part.”
Mr. Amar also explained how “you can get kind of cheesy with imaginary numbers” which can represent surprising moments in relationships. “And suddenly, things that could’ve never happened happen, kind of like the cosmic-ness aligns.”
Another math teacher, Mr. Adams, shed some light on maths’s connection to the attractiveness of a partner. “There’s some stuff out there related to the symmetry of your features and things, so maybe some loose geometric concepts,” he said.
“As far as statistics go, half of all marriages end in divorce,” he added. Ouch, that’s some tough math,
Mr. Adams also told me that the most attractive mathematician is Pythagoras, from the classical period of ancient Greece, but Mr. Adams said that Pythagoras doesn’t compare to the girl who sat in front of him in his sophomore Algebra II class.
When I talked to Mr. Kennerson, he was quick to pull up some statistics about Valentine’s Day. “2.58 billion dollars are spent on Valentine’s Day,” he said. “And the average American spends $185 on Valentine’s Day.” That’s pretty pricey if you ask me.
For my final stop, I ventured to Ms. Howard’s lively period 3 Precalculus class. Ms. Howard said, “Well If I wanted to talk about how many different possible pairs we could make out of the group of students here at Lovett, I could use combinations to figure out how many possible pairs there are.”
She needed some help thinking about math and Valentine’s Day’s kinship, so she asked the class for ideas. Junior Tristan Sindoni blurted out “3.1459… like pi and because Valentine’s is on the 14th- ‘3.14.’” Junior Emme Donaldson shouted out “Oh, pi, aye!”
I also asked Ms. Howard about who she viewed as the hottest mathematician. “So that’s disturbing on many levels,” she said. “I cannot answer that, but my favorite mathematician is Descartes.”
Personally, I’m not a fan because of his rule on signs I learned last semester in pre-calc. If only it wasn’t about finding the positive real zeros, but about getting a sign about who to fall in love with. Then again, identifying the real human zeros out there might save me a lot of heartache.
