Download or read book Beyond Numeracy written by John Allen Paulos and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-05-29 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the national bestseller Innumeracy, a delightful exploration and explanation of mathematical concepts from algebra to zero in easily accessible alphabetical entries. "Paulos . . . does for mathematics what The Joy of Sex did for the boudoir. . . ."--Washington Post Book World. First time in paperback.
Download or read book A Numerate Life written by John Allen Paulos and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2015-11-10 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Employing intuitive ideas from mathematics, this quirky "meta-memoir" raises questions about our lives that most of us don't think to ask, but arguably should: What part of memory is reliable fact, what part creative embellishment? Which favorite presuppositions are unfounded, which statistically biased? By conjoining two opposing mindsets--the suspension of disbelief required in storytelling and the skepticism inherent in the scientific method--bestselling mathematician John Allen Paulos has created an unusual hybrid, a composite of personal memories and mathematical approaches to re-evaluating them. Entertaining vignettes from Paulos's biography abound--ranging from a bullying math teacher and a fabulous collection of baseball cards to romantic crushes, a grandmother’s petty larceny, and his quite unintended role in getting George Bush elected president in 2000. These vignettes serve as springboards to many telling perspectives: simple arithmetic puts life-long habits in a dubious new light; higher dimensional geometry helps us see that we're all rather peculiar; nonlinear dynamics explains the narcissism of small differences cascading into very different siblings; logarithms and exponentials yield insight on why we tend to become bored and jaded as we age; and there are tricks and jokes, probability and coincidences, and much more. For fans of Paulos or newcomers to his work, this witty commentary on his life--and yours--is fascinating reading.
Download or read book A Numerate Life written by John Allen Paulos and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2015 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Employing intuitive ideas from mathematics, this quirky "meta-memoir" raises questions about our lives that most of us don't think to ask, but arguably should- what part of memory is reliable fact, what part creative embellishment? Which favorite presuppositions are unfounded, which statistically biased? By conjoining two opposing mindsets--the suspension of disbelief required in storytelling and the skepticism inherent in the scientific method--bestselling mathematician John Allen Paulos has created an unusual hybrid, a composite of personal memories and mathematical approaches to re-evaluating them. Entertaining vignettes from Paulos's life abound--ranging from a bullying math teacher and a fabulous collection of baseball cards to romantic crushes, a grandmother's petty larceny, and his quite unintended role in getting George Bush elected president in 2000. These stories serve as springboards to many telling perspectives, utilizing math as a vehicle- simple arithmetic puts lifelong habits in a dubious new light; higher dimensional geometry helps us see that we're all rather peculiar; nonlinear dynamics explains the narcissism of small differences cascading into very different siblings; logarithms and exponentials yield insight on why we tend to become bored and jaded as we age; and there are tricks and jokes, probability and coincidences, and much more. For fans of Paulos or newcomers to his work, this witty commentary on his life--and yours--is fascinating reading.
Download or read book Innumeracy in the Wild written by Ellen Peters and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-29 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our grasp of numbers and uncertainty is one of humankind's most distinctive and important traits. It is pivotal to our exceptional ability to control the world around us as we make short-term choices and forecast far into the future. But very smart people can struggle with numbers in ways that pose negative consequences for their decision making. Numeric ability equips individuals with vital tools that allow them to take charge of various aspects of their life. The more numerate enjoy superior health, wealth, and employment outcomes, while the innumerate remain more vulnerable. This book presents the logic, rules, and habits that highly numerate people use in decision making. Innumeracy in the Wild also introduces two additional ways of knowing numbers that complement and compensate for lower numeric ability and explores how numeric abilities develop and where mistakes are made. It offers a state-of-the-art review of the now sizeable body of psychological and applied findings that demonstrate the critical importance of numeracy in our world. With more than two decades of experience in the decision sciences, Ellen Peters demonstrates how intervention can foster adult numeric capacity, propel people to use numeric facts in decision making, and empower those with lower numeracy to reason better.
Download or read book Innumeracy written by John Allen Paulos and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Readers of Innumeracy will be rewarded with scores of astonishing facts, a fistful of powerful ideas, and, most important, a clearer, more quantitative way of looking at their world. Why do even well-educated people understand so little about mathematics? And what are the costs of our innumeracy? John Allen Paulos, in his celebrated bestseller first published in 1988, argues that our inability to deal rationally with very large numbers and the probabilities associated with them results in misinformed governmental policies, confused personal decisions, and an increased susceptibility to pseudoscience of all kinds. Innumeracy lets us know what we're missing, and how we can do something about it. Sprinkling his discussion of numbers and probabilities with quirky stories and anecdotes, Paulos ranges freely over many aspects of modern life, from contested elections to sports stats, from stock scams and newspaper psychics to diet and medical claims, sex discrimination, insurance, lotteries, and drug testing.
Download or read book A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper written by John Allen Paulos and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2013-09-10 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Allen Paulos is a master at shedding mathematical lights on our everyday world:What exactly did Lani Guinier say about quotas?What is the probability of identifying a murderer through DNA testing?Which are the real risks to our health and which the phony ones?Employing the same fun-filled, user-friendly, and quirkily insightful approach that put Innumeracy on best-seller lists, Paulos now leads us through the pages of the daily newspaper, revealing the hidden mathematical angles of countless articles. From the Senate, the SATs, and sex to crime, celebrities, and cults, Paulos takes stories that may not seem to involve mathematics at all and demonstrates how mathematical naïtéan put readers at a distinct disadvantage.Whether he's using chaos theory to puncture economic and environmental predictions, applying logic and self-reference to clarify the hazards of spin doctoring and news compression, or employing arithmetic and common sense to give us a novel perspective on greed and relationships, Paulos never fails to entertain and enlighten.Even if you hated math in school, you'll love the numerical vignettes in this book.
Download or read book The Grapes of Math written by Alex Bellos and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-06-10 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From triangles, rotations and power laws, to cones, curves and the dreaded calculus, Alex takes you on a journey of mathematical discovery with his signature wit and limitless enthusiasm. He sifts through over 30,000 survey submissions to uncover the world’s favourite number, and meets a mathematician who looks for universes in his garage. He attends the World Mathematical Congress in India, and visits the engineer who designed the first roller-coaster loop. Get hooked on math as Alex delves deep into humankind’s turbulent relationship with numbers, and reveals how they have shaped the world we live in.
Download or read book Is That a Big Number written by Andrew Elliott and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-28 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Impressive statistics are thrown at us every day - the cost of health care; the size of an earthquake; the distance to the nearest star; the number of giraffes in the world. We know all these numbers are important - some more than others - and it's vaguely unsettling when we don't really have a clear sense of how remarkable or how ordinary they are. How do we work out what these figures actually mean? Are they significant, should we be worried, or excited, or impressed? How big is big, how small is small? With this entertaining and engaging book, help is at hand. Andrew Elliott gives us the tips and tools to make sense of numbers, to get a sense of proportion, to decipher what matters. It is a celebration of a numerate way of understanding the world. It shows how number skills help us to understand the everyday world close at hand, and how the same skills can be stretched to demystify the bigger numbers that we find in the wider contexts of science, politics, and the universe. Entertaining, full of practical examples, and memorable concepts, Is That A Big Number? renews our relationship with figures. If numbers are the musical notes with which the symphony of the universe is written, and you're struggling to hear the tune, then this is the book to get you humming again.
Download or read book A Mathematician Plays The Stock Market written by John Allen Paulos and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2007-10-11 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can a renowned mathematician successfully outwit the stock market? Not when his biggest investment is WorldCom. In A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market , best-selling author John Allen Paulos employs his trademark stories, vignettes, paradoxes, and puzzles to address every thinking reader's curiosity about the market -- Is it efficient? Is it random? Is there anything to technical analysis, fundamental analysis, and other supposedly time-tested methods of picking stocks? How can one quantify risk? What are the most common scams? Are there any approaches to investing that truly outperform the major indexes? But Paulos's tour through the irrational exuberance of market mathematics doesn't end there. An unrequited (and financially disastrous) love affair with WorldCom leads Paulos to question some cherished ideas of personal finance. He explains why "data mining" is a self-fulfilling belief, why "momentum investing" is nothing more than herd behavior with a lot of mathematical jargon added, why the ever-popular Elliot Wave Theory cannot be correct, and why you should take Warren Buffet's "fundamental analysis" with a grain of salt. Like Burton Malkiel's A Random Walk Down Wall Street , this clever and illuminating book is for anyone, investor or not, who follows the markets -- or knows someone who does.
Download or read book The Numerate Leader written by Thomas A. King and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-10-21 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Learn how to make informed decisions through statistical reasoning! Using a qualitative approach to introduce statistical reasoning, The Numerate Leader: How to Pull Game-Changing Insights from Statistical Data is a cutting-edge book that helps the reader extract information from unfamiliar data sets. Combining introductory statistics with a few ideas from the philosophy of science, this work helps generalists find patterns that may be expected to recur in the future. Identifying one or two such relationships can be a game-changer for the reader and their employer or client. Thomas A. King's revelatory writing is easy to understand and conversational in tone. King makes the complex, tedious topics that you studied in the classroom—but likely didn't yet understand—easily comprehensible. Historical examples and humorous anecdotes illuminate technical concepts so that readers may pull insights from data sets and then explain conclusions reached through effective storytelling. What's more, the book is fun to read. A natural teacher, King emphasizes that complex software is unnecessary for success in this field. Readers, however, will find: Real-life examples that help put statistical concepts into an understandable context A glossary of important statistical terms and their use An appendix detailing ten math facts numerate people should know Perfect for undergraduate and graduate students entering advanced data analytics courses, as well as data analysts and c-suite executives just starting out, The Numerate Leader is key in helping develop the skills to identify provisional relationships between disparate data sets and then assess the significance of conclusions reached.
Download or read book Adults Mathematical Thinking and Emotions written by Jeff Evans and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-01-04 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The crisis around teaching and learning of mathematics and its use in everyday life and work relate to a number of issues. These include: The doubtful transferability of school maths to real life contexts, the declining participation in A level and higher education maths courses, the apparent exclusion of some groups, such as women and the aversion of many people to maths. This book addresses these issues by considering a number of key problems in maths education and numeracy: *differences among social groups, especially those related to gender and social class *the inseparability of cognition and emotion in mathematical activity *the understanding of maths anxiety in traditional psychological, psychoanalytical and feminist theories *how adults' numerate thinking and performance must be understood in context. The author's findings have practical applications in education and training, such as clarifying problems of the transfer of learning, and of countering maths anxiety.
Download or read book Mathematics and Humor written by John Allen Paulos and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-08-04 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Allen Paulos cleverly scrutinizes the mathematical structures of jokes, puns, paradoxes, spoonerisms, riddles, and other forms of humor, drawing examples from such sources as Rabelais, Shakespeare, James Beattie, René Thom, Lewis Carroll, Arthur Koestler, W. C. Fields, and Woody Allen. "Jokes, paradoxes, riddles, and the art of non-sequitur are revealed with great perception and insight in this illuminating account of the relationship between humor and mathematics."—Joseph Williams, New York Times "'Leave your mind alone,' said a Thurber cartoon, and a really complete and convincing analysis of what humour is might spoil all jokes forever. This book avoids that danger. What it does. . .is describe broadly several kinds of mathematical theory and apply them to throw sidelights on how many kinds of jokes work."—New Scientist "Many scholars nowadays write seriously about the ludicrous. Some merely manage to be dull. A few—like Paulos—are brilliant in an odd endeavor."—Los Angeles Times Book Review
Download or read book Irreligion written by John Allen Paulos and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2009-06-09 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are there any logical reasons to believe in God? Mathematician and bestselling author Paulos thinks not. In "Irreligion" he presents the case for his own worldview, organizing his book into 12 chapters that refute the 12 arguments most often put forward for believing in Gods existence.
Download or read book Living by Numbers written by Steven Connor and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2017-11-15 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ideas about numbers, magnitudes and frequencies shape and give texture to almost everything we feel, say, dream and do. In Living by Numbers, Steven Connor explores the many ways in which we live in, and by, a world of numbers. Connor homes in on the unsuspected weirdness of the number one, the links between horror, counting and the uncountable, and the close associations of numbers and death. He considers the way we make sense of crowds, swarms, masses and multitudes, and demonstrates the work of calculation that is always present in poems, jokes, laughter and pleasure. He shows how we use numbers to adjust ourselves to chance and uncertainty, examines the pressure of numbers in the experience of music, explains how they exert their force in painting, and reveals the many different ways in which numbers and quantities have taken visual form in diagrams, charts and infographics. Against the lazy and conventional assumption that human life needs to be defended against the alien and malign power of numbers, this book illustrates how essential the feeling for numbers is in all aspects of contemporary existence, arguing that no creativity or invention is in fact possible without numbers. Living by Numbers opens up for the first time the richness, variety and subtlety of how we do things with numbers and, just as importantly, how they do things with us. --
Download or read book The Math Myth written by Andrew Hacker and published by New Press, The. This book was released on 2010-05-25 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times–bestselling author looks at mathematics education in America—when it’s worthwhile, and when it’s not. Why do we inflict a full menu of mathematics—algebra, geometry, trigonometry, even calculus—on all young Americans, regardless of their interests or aptitudes? While Andrew Hacker has been a professor of mathematics himself, and extols the glories of the subject, he also questions some widely held assumptions in this thought-provoking and practical-minded book. Does advanced math really broaden our minds? Is mastery of azimuths and asymptotes needed for success in most jobs? Should the entire Common Core syllabus be required of every student? Hacker worries that our nation’s current frenzied emphasis on STEM is diverting attention from other pursuits and even subverting the spirit of the country. Here, he shows how mandating math for everyone prevents other talents from being developed and acts as an irrational barrier to graduation and careers. He proposes alternatives, including teaching facility with figures, quantitative reasoning, and understanding statistics. Expanding upon the author’s viral New York Times op-ed, The Math Myth is sure to spark a heated and needed national conversation—not just about mathematics but about the kind of people and society we want to be. “Hacker’s accessible arguments offer plenty to think about and should serve as a clarion call to students, parents, and educators who decry the one-size-fits-all approach to schooling.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
Download or read book Once Upon A Number written by John Allen Paulos and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2008-08-04 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What two things could be more different than numbers and stories? Numbers are abstract, certain, and eternal, but to most of us somewhat dry and bloodless. Good stories are full of life: they engage our emotions and have subtlety and nuance, but they lack rigor and the truths they tell are elusive and subject to debate. As ways of understanding the world around us, numbers and stories seem almost completely incompatible. Once Upon a Number shows that stories and numbers aren't as different as you might imagine, and in fact they have surprising and fascinating connections. The concepts of logic and probability both grew out of intuitive ideas about how certain situations would play out. Now, logicians are inventing ways to deal with real world situations by mathematical means -- by acknowledging, for instance, that items that are mathematically interchangeable may not be interchangeable in a story. And complexity theory looks at both number strings and narrative strings in remarkably similar terms. Throughout, renowned author John Paulos mixes numbers and narratives in his own delightful style. Along with lucid accounts of cutting-edge information theory we get hilarious anecdotes and jokes; instructions for running a truly impressive pyramid scam; a freewheeling conversation between Groucho Marx and Bertrand Russell (while they're stuck in an elevator together); explanations of why the statistical evidence against OJ Simpson was overwhelming beyond doubt and how the Unabomber's thinking shows signs of mathematical training; and dozens of other treats. This is another winner from America's favorite mathematician.
Download or read book Who s Counting written by John Allen Paulos and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-09-15 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For decades, New York Times best-selling author John Allen Paulos has enlightened readers by showing how to make sense of the numbers and probabilities behind real-world events, political calculations, and everyday personal decisions. Who’s Counting? features dozens of his insightful essays—original writings on contemporary issues like the COVID-19 pandemic, online conspiracy theories, “fake news,” and climate change, as well as a selection of enduring columns from his popular ABC News column of the same name. With an abiding respect for reason, a penchant for puzzles with societal implications, and a disarming sense of humor, Paulos does in this collection what he’s famous for: clarifies mathematical ideas for everyone and shows how they play a role in government, media, popular culture, and life. He argues that if we can’t critically interpret numbers and statistics, we lose one of our most basic and reliable guides to reality.
