A year ago, I was introduced to the Spirograph toy when I was looking for a gift I could 3-D print for a friend. (Yes, I’m 20 years late.) Whilst I was realising what was missing from my childhood and wasting tons of paper, I could not stop thinking about the maths behind it. So here is a fun post about the maths behind the Spirograph toy, complete with some sexy curves (SFW) created using my Spirograph web app.

Join me in this follow-up to the post on the Stable Marriage problem as we ignore the polyamorous yet again for the sake of framing an algorithm in an interesting but infeasible context.

As it turns out, thanks to two men, David Gale and Lloyd Shapley, we can use maths to cure a global pandemic that has been plaguing humanity for far too long. That’s right - we can cure infidelity. “Wait, no, that’s impossible,” you say. “Can we really reduce human desire and instinct to parameters of a finite and definite algorithm?” Probably not, but we can try.