Author: John Allen Paulos
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 1996
Language: English
Pages: 212
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0140251812
Description
A lovely mixture of abstractness and concreteness, revealing the constant relevance of paradox, humor, statistics, chaos and meta-level thinking to our attempt to understand our fundamentally unpredictable world.
Innumeracy, wrote Isaac Asimov, would improve the equality of thinking of virtually anyone. In his new book, John Allen Paulos continues his liberating campaign against mathematical illiteracy.
Although a life-long lover of newspapers, he knows they never give us the truth in black or white. Whatever they tell us about health scares or racial quotas, voting patterns or DNA testing, it is certain to be simplified. Advertisers and spin doctors make conscious efforts to deceive us, and even profiles, reviews and recipes need to be taken with a large pinch of salt. It is here that we could all use a grounding in mathematics. Chaos theory, for example, reveals instantly why it is pointless to predict economic or environmental trends.
Mathematical naivete, writes Paulos, can put readers at a disadvantage in thinking about many issues in the news that may not seem to involve mathematics at all. His book offers the liveliest and most entertaining of remedies.
REVIEWS
Mathematics is all around you. And it’s a great defense against the sharks, cowboys and liars who want your vote, your money or your life-as John Allen Paulos’s latest book makes crystal clear.
-Lan Stewart, author of Does God Play Dice?
This book should be mandatory reading for every journalist – as well as the readers, viewers and former tutors they supposedly serve.
-Robert Matthews in New Scientist
Contents
Introduction
SECTION 1:
Politics, Economics, and the Nation
SECTION 2:
Local, Business, and Social Issues
SECTION 3:
Lifestyle, Spin, and Soft News
SECTION 4:
Science, Medicine, and the Environment
SECTION 5:
Food, Book Reviews, Sports, Obituaries
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index