Love Affair and Differential Equations

In nonlinear dynamics class today, we reviewed linear algebra, differential equations, eigenvalues, and eigenvectors. Professor Strogatz was bored with this stuff, but he managed to keep his cool and proceeded at a fast yet organized speed. He showed the different classes of system dynamics that can arise from a 2-D system, as this will become useful when we start talking about nonlinear systems.

At the end of that review session, he made a comment about how you can model the love affairs between two people in a relationship using such second order differential equations. Just when the class laughed thinking he was kidding, he said that he once wrote a paper with the title, "Love Affairs and Differential Equations". Just as the class burst into more laughter, he claims that it is listed as the 3rd strangest title among mathmatics papers. I searched for it, and indeed that paper was written in 1988 for the Math Magazine, and it has also been cited by other papers discussing love dynamics.

The most hilarious part was when he said he wrote it in Freshman year while having trouble with a girlfriend and he was trying to analyze it with that model, but an older boyfriend makes the system a 3rd order nonlinear system, so it was too complicated for him.

After a little search for that ranking, I found a book called Wonders of Numbers: Adventures in Mathmatics, Mind, and Meaning. On page 102 it lists the top 10 serious mathmatical papers with strange, indecipherable, and/or amusing titles. The first one is "Zaphod Beeblebrox's brain and the fifty-ninth row of Pascal's Triangle", and the second one is "When homogeneous continua are Hausdorff circles (or yes, we Hausdorff bananas)". The fourth one is "Super super large numbers".

I also found a 2005 paper titled "Dynamical Models of Happiness" published in Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and Life Sciences.

Interesting huh?