The scientist Helen Fisher once revealed how she ended up marrying the love of her life at 75. After months of chaste socialising, she and her beau played a game of pool, each having written down on a cocktail napkin what they wanted as a prize if they won.

After he triumphantly potted the winning ball, she opened his napkin to reveal the words: “sex and clarity”. Her napkin read: “a real kiss”. The eventual arc of their relationship — from friends to bed mates to spouses — would have been little surprise to Fisher, an anthropologist who studied the science of love and attraction. Both friendship and lust, she believed, could blossom into romantic love and then a deeper attachment.

Fisher, who died of endometrial cancer last month aged 79, left a striking legacy: legitimising love as a subject worthy of scholarly inquiry while somehow not diminishing its magic. Early on, science did not quite know what to make of her: as she told it, a reviewer rejected one of her papers on the basis that love was a supernatural phenomenon. Her punchy response was a string of books bearing such titles as The Sex Contract: The Evolution of Human Behavior and Anatomy of Love: the Natural History of Monogamy, Adultery and Divorce.