Spock Women and Romeo Men

You can read about the five types of lovers, with thanks to my many creative friends who came up with names for them and Yang Su for data, on the eHarmony blog. 

The tree of lovers is known as a dendrogram, which we often use in biology for data that might form a tree-like structure -- species, cell lines, or even human tissues. I made this one in Daphne Koller’s biocomputation lab with Alexis Battle and Sara Mostafavi:

Isn’t it remarkable that the same math that describes genetics can also describe online dating? That a single construct lets us understand the heart both biologically and romantically? Statistics, bros -- it's magical.

Notes:

[1] This tree turns out to be much more useful than the tree of lovers because tissues that are close to each other in the tree have similar properties: we can use one brain tissue, for example, to tell us something about gene regulation in the other brain tissues.