Does success as an artist bring you more sexual conquests?

To deal with their realisation that some artists get a lot of sex while others get little or none, Helen Clegg, Daniel Nettle [shown here in a portrait of himself that’s featured on his web site] and Dorothy Miell made use of an ancient tool – a tool that mathematicians count among the sexiest of mankind’s inventions. The logarithm.

The trio had joined forces, as they later described it, to “investigate the relationship between mating success and artistic success in a sample of 236 visual artists”.

Clegg is a University of Northampton senior lecturer in psychology, Nettle a professor of behavioural science at Newcastle University and Miell the head of the College of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Edinburgh.

Their report, called Status and Mating Success Amongst Visual Artists, appears in the journal Frontiers in Psychology….

So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian