Why 32+27 adds up to a life of wedded bliss

by Abdul Taher

You may have thought the key to successful marriage was finding the perfect partner - well,not according to one leading statistician.
Prof Dennis Lindley has come up with a formula which could help save the institution of marriage and stem the soaring divorce rate.
He claims:

M=Y+(1/e[X-Y])

Ideal: Norman Cook and Zöe Ball

delivers the optimum age for people to tie the knot - 32 for men and 27 for women. After that,the chances of finding an ideal partner become increasingly slim - with some condemned to spend the rest of their lives searching for love,Prof Lindley said.
To find an optimum marriageable age,subtract the earliest age you start looking for a partner (the professor assumes 16) from the latest age you would expect to marry (he says 60 for men,46 for women),multiply it by a logarithmic formula (which works out at 0.36),then add it again to your starting age. Confused? Well,Prof Lindley isn't. Now 80 and married for 56 years,he said the formula will help men decide when to stop playing the field.
The academic,from London's University College,added: "In the run-in period,men are learning about ladies.But they mustn't do this for too long."
Based on the professor's sums,DJ's Norman Cook and Zöe Ball are close to having a perfect marriage - despite her dalliance with another man - because he was 35  and she was 28 when they tied the knot.

Ideal gift wrapping formula perfected

THE exact science of perfect gift wrapping has been devised by a maths expert Bntons waste more than a tonne of paper over the festive season by overestimating how much they need to use. But now Warwick Dumas, of the University of Leicester, has devised a formula to work out the most efficient amount of paper for each present. The equation will help consumers decide whether they should roll the paper around the gift or wrap the paper over the top of it to ensure they reduce their gift-wrapping footprint. According to a survey by Blue water shopping centre in Kent, nearly half of the British public rate their present wrapping skills as 'average' or 'awful'. And, in case you were wondering, the essential wrapping formula is: A1 = 2(ab+ac+bc+c), where A is the area of paper needed and a, b and c are the dimensions of the gift. Brilliant.

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