How Ovaries Count and Balls Add Up Some such chick called Clio Cresswell has written a book called Mathematics & Sex, and Slashdot nerds are gagging to review it. From reminiscing about about high-school math puns to the bar scene in A Beautiful Mind, it's all happening here. The book discusses 'problems' like choosing a life partner out of the 100 successive people you meet:

You can prove mathematically that the best strategy is to look at (approximately) the first 36.787944117144235 people (rounding it to, say, 37 people) and then you should choose the first person from that point on that is 'better' then the previous 37 people. This increases the odds of your finding the best match from 1% to about 37%- roughly a 37 times improvement. (In the pre-politically correct literature this model was called "The Sultan's Dowry Problem," or "The Secretary Problem"; now, alas, it is usually called simply an example of an "Optimal Stopping Problem." )  ¶ 8:24:00 PM