Meet Peter Backus

Peter Backus is a fourth year Ph.D candidate at the University of Warwick. Peter took a novel approach to solving a problem. He chose to apply Drake's Equation for estimating the existence of intelligent life in the galaxy to his problem. What's his problem you ask? It's the number of London females with whom he "might possibly have a wonderful relationship".

Peter wants to find someone, a girlfriend to be specific. Instead of puting himself out there on the socializing scene, (which is what most of us in his predicament would do) Peter decided to assess his chances at happiness in a relationship mathematically before he did anything else.

He considered the rate of UK population growth, how many women there were and how many women lived in London. I guess those were his "predetermined" factors. Then he plugged in fluid variables: an age group of 24 to 34, a university degree and physical attractiveness to him. This reduced his pool to 10,510 Londoners.

What was the final all-important number you ask?
Twenty-six. Yep, 26.

Even faced with that bleak conclusion, the man remained optimistic - for perspective, he states that is 100 times more than the chances of finding intelligent life, capable of communicating with us, in the galaxy.
Read Peter's full analysis (funny as heck too) here.