Student Peter Backus uses alien maths to explain why single men can't find a girlfriend
- January 13, 2010
- Drake Equation designed to predict aliens
- Student applies it to finding love in London
- Despite small chance, he now has a girlfriend
A STUDENT has taken a mathematical equation that predicts the possibility of alien life in the universe to explain why he can't find a girlfriend.
Peter Backus, a native of Seattle and PhD candidate in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick, near London, took on his own dating woes in "Why I don't have a girlfriend: An application of the Drake Equation to love in the UK."
In describing the paper online, he wrote "the results are not encouraging", MyFox reports.
"The probability of finding love in the UK is only about 100 times better than the probability of finding intelligent life in our galaxy."
Mr Backus, 30, found that of the 30 million women in the UK, only 26 would be suitable girlfriends for him, according to Click Liverpool.
His equation looked at the total number of women in the country, then narrowed it down using relevant factors including the number of women in London; the number of "age-appropriate" women (those aged between 24-34); women with a college degree; and those who Mr Backus would find physically attractive.
In the paper Mr Backus summarized that on a given night out in London there is a 0.0000034 per cent chance of meeting a woman that meets his criteria and who is also interested in him.
That makes his odds of finding a girlfriend only about 100 times better than finding an alien.
But in the end Mr Backus defied the odds.
He has a girlfriend of about six months.
"She's from London," he told Asylum.com.
"And she meets all my criteria."
The Drake Equation was developed in 1961 by Dr. Frank Drake at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in West Virginia. It reads N = R* x Fp x Ne x Fi x Fc x L, and helped predict that there could be 10,000 civilizations in our galaxy.
Read more at MyFox.