How Not to Be Wrong

The Freakonomics of math a math world superstar unveils the hidden beauty and logic of the world and puts its power in our handsThe math we learn in school can seem like a dull set of rules, laid down by the ancients and not to be questioned In How Not to Be Wrong, Jordan Ellenberg shows us how terribly limiting this view is Math isn t confined to abstract incidents that never occur in real life, but rather touches everything we do the whole world is shot through with it.Math allows us to see the hidden structures underneath the messy and chaotic surface of our world It s a science of not being wrong, hammered out by centuries of hard work and argument Armed with the tools of mathematics, we can see through to the true meaning of information we take for granted How early should you get to the airport What does public opinion really represent Why do tall parents have shorter children Who really won Florida in 2000 And how likely are you, really, to develop cancer How Not to Be Wrong presents the surprising revelations behind all of these questions and many , using the mathematician s method of analyzing life and exposing the hard won insights of the academic community to the layman minus the jargon Ellenberg chases mathematical threads through a vast range of time and space, from the everyday to the cosmic, encountering, among other things, baseball, Reaganomics, daring lottery schemes, Voltaire, the replicability crisis in psychology, Italian Renaissance painting, artificial languages, the development of non Euclidean geometry, the coming obesity apocalypse, Antonin Scalia s views on crime and punishment, the psychology of slime molds, what Facebook can and can t figure out about you, and the existence of God.Ellenberg pulls from history as well as from the latest theoretical developments to provide those not trained in math with the knowledge they need Math, as Ellenberg says, is an atomic powered prosthesis that you attach to your common sense, vastly multiplying its reach and strength With the tools of mathematics in hand, you can understand the world in a deeper, meaningful way How Not to Be Wrong will show you how. Read How Not to Be Wrong – kino-fada.fr Here s the deal If you re a social scientist or a physical scientist me who works outside the world of controlled laboratory data, you have to make sense of the world with imperfect experiments You often have limited data, you can t repeat your experiments, and the differences between your subject and control are sometimes very fuzzy Yet you have to try to make some inferences even though imperfect data are all you have How do you do that in an honest and careful way That s what How Not T Here s the deal If you re a social scientist or a physical scientist me who works outside the world of controlled laboratory data, you have to make sense of the world with imperfect experiments You often have limited data, you can t repeat your experiments, and the differences between your subject and control are sometimes very fuzzy Yet you have to try to make some inferences even though imperfect data are all you have How do you do that in an honest and careful way That s what How Not To Be Wrong is about.How Not To Be Wrong is, in terms of quality of prose, the best written book on applied math and statistics I ve ever read The author has an MFA as well as a math Ph.D., so maybe that s not surprising The title isn t quite right, though The book is really about how to try to be right even though you know you re going to make mistakes now and then Th...This is a wonderful book about mathematics and its application to everyday life Jordan Ellenberg shows that the certainty that people associate with math is often misplaced some areas of math are devoted to uncertainty, and that s where things get very interesting.Ellenberg starts the book with a beautiful example of application of mathematics, logic, and thinking out of the box During World War II, a group of mathematicians working for the Statistical Research Group were given a problem by s This is a wonderful book about mathematics and its application to everyday life Jordan Ellenberg shows that the certainty that people associate with math is often misplaced some areas of math are devoted to uncertainty, and that s where things get very interesting.Ellenberg starts the book with a beautiful example of application of mathematics, logic, and thinking out of the box During World War II, a group of mathematicians working for the Statistical Research Group were given a problem by some Air Force officers Fighter planes returning from missions were analyzed for bullet holes The number of bullet holes per square foot were counted For example, there were 1.11 bu...I math for a living I mathed, both amateurly and professionally, at school I math quite a bit And as a math teacher, I like reading pop math books that try to do for math what many science writers have done for science So picking up How Not to Be Wrong was a no brainer when I saw it on that bookstore shelf I ve read and enjoyed some of Jordan Ellenberg s columns on Slate and elsewhere some of them appear or are adapted as chapters of this book And he doesn t disappoint.I should make on I math for a living I mathed, both amateurly and professionally, at school I math quite a bit And as a math teacher, I like reading pop math books that try to do for math what many science writers have done for science So picking up How Not to Be Wrong was a no brainer when I saw it on that bookstore shelf I ve read and enjoyed some of Jordan Ellenberg s columns on Slate and elsewhere some of them appear or are adapted as chapters of this book And he doesn t disappoint.I should make one thing clear I mainlined this book like it was the finest heroin Partly that s because I just love reading about math, but in this case I was also days away from moving back to Canada from the UK when I started this, and luggage space was at a premium, so I was on a deadline to finish this book I injecte...I so wanted to like this book.It s a topic I enjoy I flicked through the book and the author was saying things that I agree with Jordan clearly knows what he is talking about All the signs were good.So why the 3 stars Because the book is unfortunately quite dull There are long sections where Jordan spends ages proving some mathematical point or other, but then he doesn t draw any conclusions from it.He starts with a story about school kids not liking mathematics because they can t see the r I so wanted to like this bo...This book was an excellent guide to the many ways in which our intuitions and poorly understood statistical training can lead us astray One of the areas that it covers is regression to the mean, a concept which pretty much everyone needs to be aware of, since a better awareness of its ubiquity would prevent a lot of errors Among other things, this concept explains why a successful pilot study is likely to give worse results when rolled out, why a good performance is often followed by a worse p This book was an excellent guide to the many ways in which our intuitions and poorly understood statistical training can lead us astray One of the areas that it covers is regression to the mean, a concept which pretty much everyone needs to be aware of, since a better awareness of its ubiquity would prevent a lot of errors Among other things, this concept explains why a successful pilot study is likely to give worse results when rolled out, why a good performance is often followed by a worse perfor...Connections James Burke expected value expected value , correlation Connections James Burke expected value expected value , correlation causation , hypothesis testing Zeno s Paradox nonlinearity Having come back to math in my late twenties, this book was comforting and gave me hope that learning the equations and complicated language would not be for nothing It s also a lot of fun to read.Enjoyable, entry level book, particularly recommended to any lover of applied maths who did not get prior significant exposure to the main concepts of statistics and probability calculus.The author writes in a very engaging and conversational manner, and his enthusiasm for maths is quite contagious I like how he manages to compellingly convey the message that math is a creative process, not a sterile, procedural slog.While the book is designed to be understood by a wide audience, so it is neces Enjoyable, entry level book, particularly recommended to any lover of applied maths who did not get prior significant exposure to the main concepts of statistics and probability calculus.The author writes in a very engaging and conversational manner, and his enthusiasm for maths is quite contagious I like how he manages to compellingly convey the message that math is a creative process, not a sterile, procedural slog.While the book is designed to be understood by a wide audience, so it is necessarily kept at a pretty popular level which disappointed me a little bit...Where language and math meet is where my head explodes.That s this book.Fortunately, the author has a funny, down to earth style that keeps me going even when my eyes glaze over and start to roll back into my head That has nothing to do with him it s all me He and I have a fundamental difference in wiring he loves numbers and the things they can do For him they sing For me, they are instruments of torment and deceit Let me give you an example Here s one from page 44 et seq., where he dem Where language and math meet is where my head explodes.That s this book.Fortunately, the author has a funny, down to earth style that keeps me going even when my eyes glaze over and start to roll back into my head That has nothing to do wi...Almost everything that we do these days has some sort of mathematical element to it, from analysis by companies that are looking for patterns, voting, the stock market and ways of winning the lottery.Ellenberg does make some reasonable arguments I particularly liked the explanations on the three way voting where the favoured guy can end up being eliminated purely because of the first past the post method, and the way that groups were able to exploit a badly designed lottery And most of the tim Almost everything that we do these days has some sort of mathematical element to it, from analysis by companies that are looking for patterns, voting, the stock market and ways of winning the lottery.Ellenberg does make some reasonable arguments I particularly liked the explanations on the three way voting where the favoured guy can end up being eliminated purely because of the first past the post method, and the way that groups were able to exploit a badly designed lottery And most of the time he does a reasonable job of getting his points across using mathematical explanations and details reve...

• English
• 04 February 2017
Jordan Ellenberg
• Hardcover
• 480 pages
• 1594205221
• Jordan Ellenberg
• How Not to Be Wrong