Modeling Love With Math (February 12th, 2026)
For Valentine's Day, we discussed modeling love with math. However, rather than showing students the graphs associated with love, we had them figure out how the graphs looked by slowly feeding them more and more information about the graphs. The information was as follows.
- If the individuals are non-antagonistic at a given time, then they remain non-antagonistic forever.
- The system equals out at a value; in other words, both people are in love as much as the other. This value must be positive.
- Two individuals completely indifferent to each other when they first meet develop a love story characterized by smoothly increasing feelings.
- An increase in the reactiveness to love ("appeal") of an individual cause an increase in the love of both individuals at equilibrium. A similar property can be derived from this where this individual falls in love "relatively" faster (derivative).
- Increasing the appeal of an individual causes an increase in the love of both individuals at equilibrium. This also causes the partner to fall in love "relatively" faster (derivative).
Since the graph varied based on the parameters given, we have a Python script below that can plot the graph based on the given parameters. NOTE: This program does take a while to run.
If there are any students interested in the application of mathematics to love, they should consider reading the following books:
