Book Review: How Not To Be Wrong
04.17.2016
How Not To Be Wrong by Jordan Ellenburg is a book describing how math is used (and misused) in everyday life. From the lottery, to elections, to predicting the weather and the existence of God, Ellenburg explains how to develop a better intuition for all the number and percentages swirling around the news and media. It focuses mostly on statistics, but also delves into geometry + algebra (and their relationship), multi-dimensional spaces and linear algebra, and number theory. As a "relatively mathy" person, I definitely felt like I got a lot out of it,though I'm not entirely sure I would recommend it to less mathematically-inclined readers. Although I believe it was intended for that audience, and is definitely an accessible view into high mathematics, it's also a book about math. My point being: don't expect to be spoon fed math and magically become knowledgable. Like with all knowledge, you've gotta put in a little work. But it's totally worth it.
Some favorite quotes:
- "And you can't deny that there are aspects of the natural world - I'm thinking pandas here - that seem more likely to have resulted from grudging bureaucratic compromise than from the mind of an all knowing deity with total creative control"
- "For those who are willing to adopt a view of probability as degree of belief Bayes theorem can be seen not as a mere mathematical equation, but as a form of mathematically flavored advice"
