A Little Sumthing

From Day and Night magazine in today's Irish Independent

I hate maths - probably more than anything on earth. All through school it was the bane of my existence. I had the same maths teacher for my whole time there, and Lord, if I didn’t age the man prematurely. I can still see the look of despair on his face as he tried to drum what a cosine was into my innumerate skull.


But what got me through it was knowing that once I left school, maths would cease to have any impact on my life, apart from basic addition and subtraction (which I can just about pull off).


But new research from one Dr Clio Cresswell has blown that assumption right out of the algebra-free water. Cresswell is a numerical sexpert – surely a first – who claims that there are very deep connections between love, sex and mathematics.


She maintains that maths formulas can be used to detect patterns in our love lives, and so can be used to guide the search for our perfect partner (Up until now, the only way maths infringed in that area of my life was when I tried to pose in clubs from my most a-cute angles).


So for instance, Dr Cresswell argues that you should make a list of all the things you’re looking for in someone and test them on 12 consecutive lovers - and reject them all. You then pick the best one that comes after that – a formula which, apparently, guarantees a 75 per cent chance of happiness.


Pure hokum? Maybe. But it would make sense in the context of my love life. I barely scraped through ordinary level maths in the Leaving, ergo I’m destined to scrape through an ordinary level love life. And there I was wasting my time on English and History!


So maybe I should buck up now, and put in the hard work I should have done in secondary school in order to change my dysfunctional relationship with maths. With a little help from my unsurprisingly non-dog-eared copy of Less Stress More Success, I’ll soon be an A1 love student, right?


I wouldn’t count on it.