Matthew Coakley works out what his chances are of finding a girlfriend at university.
It’s a Saturday afternoon; I’ve just lost on the Grand National. (Quinz fell – feel my pain and lighter than normal wallet.) So what I have decided to do, after being inspired by a journal from a Warwick University Economist who conducted the same study for himself in London, is to work out how many prospective girlfriends I could have in the University. It is a bit strange and silly but it’s all in the name of good fun – feel free to work it out for yourself!
There was an astronomer, Dr. Frank Drake, who formulated an equation to estimate the number of planets sustaining life, which we can communicate with in space. Generally, it’s accepted that the equation looks like this:
G=R∙ne∙fi∙fi∙fc∙L
G is the number of planets we could communicate with.
R is the rate of formation of planets capable of supporting life.
ne is the average number of planets like earth in each planetary system.
fi is the fraction of earth like planets supporting life of any kind.
fi is the fraction of earth like planets where intelligent life develops.
fc is the fraction of planets with intelligent life with the ability to communicate with us.
L is simply the length of time communicative civilisations survive.
Frank worked out that from the 300 billion planets in the Milky Way, we could communicate with about 10,000. Meaning the chance of picking a planet at random and being able to communicate is 0.00000008%. This approach, believe it or not, is widely accepted. So essentially, there probably is life on another planet with whom we can communicate with. (NB: Don’t expect Facebook chat to be able to do it – it doesn’t even work here…)
Now, how do we use this to work out how likely it is I could find a girlfriend at uni? Firstly, we re-hash this equation, but use the same deductive technique. Peter Backus did this is in his paper slightly different to how I’ve done mine. Feel free to check out his article just Google his name and it’s the second option.
G will be the number of potential girlfriends in University.
Ns will be the number of Undergraduate students at the University (Sorry Postgrads!) This is 18710
fg shall be the fraction of undergrads who are gender appropriate. Female in my case – which is around 54%.
fF is the fraction of Undergrads who are Full Time students. Ideally, I would be indifferent between Part and Full time but I meet far more full timers… This is 56%
fA is the fraction of female full time undergrads who are age appropriate, between 18 and 22 I think is fair. (I’m 20 myself so a 2 year derivation is pretty normal.) I can’t find any statistics for this, so on this glorious weekend I’m going to take a massive guess and say 75% of students are between those ages.
fB The fraction of age appropriate, full time undergraduate females that I find physically attractive. Let’s make no bones about it; being attracted to your other half is fairly fundamental to a relationship… I’ve not taken a survey or anything – it’s a bit insulting to label women into categories based on looks. So I’m going to say I find 1 in 15 of the above women attractive.
Finally, L, the length of time, in years, I’ve been at University. I’m a second year, so it’s 2.
Plug the numbers into this:
G=Ns∙fg∙fF∙fA∙fB∙L=18710∙0.54∙0.56∙0.75∙2=8486
Essentially, on any given day, I have a 45% chance of meeting a potential girlfriend. Excellent news for me! However, we still have a long way to go. We have to take the fraction of those who find me attractive. I’m going to say 1 in 20, which is fairly reasonable albeit terribly upsetting… What about those who are taken? Let’s assume half of these girls are single. Now we come to the crunch; how many of those will get along with me? I like to think I’m a decent and affable chap, so 1 in 10. 10% of these women so far, I would be able to get along with well enough to form a relationship. Taking all of this into account, I can estimate there are roughly… 21 potential girlfriends.
Yeah, from the 18710 students at Hull University, I may be able to form a relationship with 0.001% of them. I have about 1 in 1000th chance of finding a prospective girlfriend on any given day. Looks like the Grand National was only the start of a bad day for me… Feel free to use the equation to work it out for yourself – the figures are available on websites everywhere!
Matt Coakley
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