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Blog post: ajb: Happiness is a long equation

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As you can imagine as a mathematician, the bigger and harder the equations the happier I am. Not really, we look for pattens and elegance rather than just difficult equations, though of course difficult equations can be elegant and contain a lot of interesting structure.

 

Anyway, scientists now have an equation for happiness and here it is

 

 

happy

Taken from [1].

 

Now we just need to apply some calculus to find the maxima (local or global I'm not fussy) and find out just how happy a mathematician can be!

 

 

Reference

[1] Robb B. Rutledge, Nikolina Skandali, Peter Dayan, and Raymond J. Dolan, A computational and neural model of momentary subjective well-being, PNAS 2014 : 1407535111v1-201407535.

 

Link

Equation 'can predict momentary happiness' BBC News
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