(telegraph) Peter Backus – a maths tutor at the University of Warwick – is the author of a controversial thesis: Why I Don't Have A Girlfriend. In it, the 31-year-old estimates that our chances of finding love are just one in 285,000. By applying Professor Drake's opaque theory of astrophysics N = R* x Fp x Ne x Fi x Fc x L (in which the pioneering scientist predicted that there could be 10,000 civilisations in our galaxy) to singledom, Backus has discovered that out of the 30 million women in the UK, only 26 would make suitable girlfriends for him. Isn't he just being picky, though? "This is what people tell me," laughs Backus, a good-looking man from Seattle, "particularly because of the part where I say that I might only find one in twenty women attractive, but I don't just mean good-looking, I mean attractive to me." "The paper isn't actually about how to find love," he continues. "It's about how to find a potential girlfriend. I can say fairly mechanically that I will not be falling in love with an 85-year-old woman. What I wanted, among other things, was somebody with a university education, who lived nearby and was between 24 and 34 years old." After a three-year period as a single man following a broken heart, Backus set about discovering precisely why he was having such trouble finding a girlfriend. The paper, he says, "only took me two hours to write – any super nerdy person could have done it." But when one of his students posted the thesis on an internet chat room, the response was extraordinary. "My in-box was rammed with emails from one day to the next. People were writing to me from all over the world, from China to Greece. There were women saying they would be my girlfriend, and men explaining how to manipulate women into being the people you want them to be. A woman in Brazil proposed marriage, and a TV producer got in touch about possibly using the thesis as the foundation for a TV show."

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