For Nerds: The Odds of Finding the One

For Nerds: The Odds of Finding the One

Even a billionaire who is a CEO of two companies (Tesla & SpaceX) and works 80–100 hours a week had this to say about love:

NB: The estimations that I do here are just done to give insight on finding a soulmate. I use myself as an example in the calculations that I do.

We all know that there are at least 7 billion people in the world, but most people like to date someone who is closer to their geographical location. So now we need to pick a place. I will pick Johannesburg, South Africa, since I live there. So now the question is: what are the odds of finding someone truly meant for you A.K.A a soulmate, in Johannesburg?

Well, first of all, how many people are there in Johannesburg currently? There are currently about 5,926,668 people in Johannesburg. Since I am 27 years old, I have to determine how many females are there https://kissbrides.com/pt-pt/blog/chineses-sites-de-namoro-e-apps/ between the ages 20–29. For this calculation I use the latest population pyramid that I could find of the whole of South Africa and assume that:

  • It’s the same distribution for Johannesburg.
  • The 2020 population pyramid hasn’t changed much for the age range 20 -29 in 2021.

As we can see, there are about 4.1% females aged 20–24 and 4.4% females aged 25–29. What this could infer based on my assumptions is that there are about 503,767 females aged 20-29.

The question here now is: how many of them would I find attractive? Well, in percentage, I would probably find 40% of the females aged 20-29 attractive, but the number might be lower. Actually, OkCupid an online dating site, showed profile pictures of women who were members to “men looking for women” members, and the other way around (pictures of men users to “women looking for men” ones) and had them rate them on a seven-point scale from least attractive to most attractive. Weiterlesen