How to Choose a Wife
This is sort of a response to our friend Kelsey's post about marrying a good husband . It's also a fun math problem, so I can't resist writing about it. Here it is: how does one choose a wife? We'll begin with some rules: You'll meet N eligible partners, in random order, over your dating lifetime. You don't know beforehand, during, or even directly after the date, who your best partner is, but you can judge each date relative to previous dates. You can date from the total population of N partners until choosing one to marry, or exhausting the population -- at which point you're stuck with the last one. After each date, you have to decide whether that person is the one . If so, you marry. If not, you resume dating from the rest of the population, but cannot date that person again. So, it's kind of like barbering: the trick lies in knowing where to stop. It should be pretty obvious that you don't want to marry the very first person you date, becau...