Horse kick, V-2 and true love

[Ya Sam]

"Love, here as everywhere, is different. True love is rare; we can only hope 
to find it once in a lifetime, and maybe not even then. The curve that 
charts love is very narrow -more like a steeple than a bell. It's called a 
Poisson curve and its classic exemplar was the chance of being kicked to 
death by a horse while serving in the Prussian cavalry.

The normal distribution was discovered during the 18th century, when 
confident Age of Enlightenment types assumed that all people, places and 
times were pretty much alike. Statistics that produce a bell curve (like, 
say, the heights of everyone on your street), show a clear average, with 
plenty of readings within a predictable range around that average, called a 
"standard deviation''. Common qualities, such as height, are easy to 
forecast.

Simeon-Denis Poisson, though, lived in the more unpredictable 19th century. 
He was interested in rare events. He wanted to discover how well you could 
predict the chances of one such event occurring during a given time 
(improbable); two events (very improbable); three (like, totally 
improbable); or four (so improbable you can forget about it).

Formula

Years of work produced a formula that allowed just such prediction - and 
Poisson's successor, Ladislaus Bortkiewicz, applied it to the chances of a 
given cavalry regiment suffering a death by horse kick in a given year. In a 
triumph of mathematical prediction, the actual figures for the German army 
between 1875 and 1894 matched almost perfectly the numbers generated by 
theory.

While the bell curve describes things we can expect; Poisson's formula 
predicts things we fear or hope for - things that, though rare, could happen 
at any time. In the Second World War, the British used it to predict the 
likelihood of any particular neighbourhood in London being hit by a V-2 
rocket. Telephone companies use it to predict the likelihood that any 
particular number is going to ring at a particular moment (it's low, 
although somehow much higher when you're in the bath). The chance that the 
store will run out of your cat's favourite food or the chance a war will 
break out somewhere today: If there's an average occurrence of any event 
over time, however low, Poisson's formula can predict a likelihood for the 
here and now.

True love is such an event. It could be today; it could be never. All we 
know is that it happens to some people, sometimes. This makes me believe 
that the hope of meeting the love of your life is also governed by the 
Poisson curve. If so, it suggests some interesting conclusions. "

http://archive.gulfnews.com/articles/06/10/13/10074267.html

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