Status
Call number
Collection
Publication
Description
"In How Not to Be Wrong, Jordan Ellenberg shows us that 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 more, 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 pulls from history as well as from the latest theoretical developments to provide those not trained in math with the knowledge they need. "--… (more)
Media reviews
User reviews
Anticipating readers' feeling towards mathematics, Jordan Ellenberg attempts to answer the most-asked question in math classes first: "So, when am I going to use this?" Ellenberg encourages people to look deeper into things and discover the math in our everyday lives. However, he is very straightforward and also admits that there are aspects of your mathematical education that you might not specifically need anymore. But why should you still learn maths? Ellenberg argues that there is so much more to maths than just adding and subtracting numbers or doing fractions. Math classes improve your way of thinking about many aspects in your life - or at least, math classes should do that. This issue is still debated among math teachers. There are still the ones who prefer the traditional approach of having students practice doing fractions and solving yet another sometimes often slightly math-related problem until they finally discover an algorithm that they can use for a very limited range of problems 'normal' people don't have, anyway. And then there is the more modern approach to teach students the meaning behind what they are doing and to promote critical thinking before mindlessly applying algorithms to problems. This is not to say that students should not learn algorithms anymore. They still should, to my (and Ellenberg's) mind. However, this is just the foundation of what maths is all about. The following quotation sums up Ellenberg's view quite nicely and I couldn't agree more.
"Working an integral or performing linear regression is something that a computer can do quite effectively. Understanding whether the result makes sense - or deciding whether the method is the right one to use in the first place - requires a guiding human hand. When we teach mathematics we are supposed to be explaning how to be that guide. A math course that fails to do so is essentially training the student to be a very slow, buggy version of Microsoft Excel. And let's be frank: that really is what many of our math courses are doing."
At the same time, Ellenberg admits that not everything can be solved with one hundred percent certainty, even though this is often expected of mathematicians. Sometimes, for example when asked to predict which presidential candidate is going to win a certain state, mathematicians can provide a probability, but not rule out uncertainty entirely. However:
"Math gives us a way of being unsure in a principled way: not just throwing up our hands and saying 'huh,' but rather making a firm assertion: 'I'm not sure, and this is roughly how not-sure I am.' Or even more: 'I'm unsure, and you should be too.'"
The book also touches upon a topic many of us discuss around here. Are pop fiction and classic literature - literature with a capital 'L', if you may - mutually exclusive? Or framed differently: Is reading pop fiction a waste of time, and is classic literature always worth the time and effort you put in reading? Ellenberg compares this to the phenomenon of how the guys (or women, for that matter) you meet are either handsome and mean or nice and ugly, but never nice and handsome. He says that we do not even look at the mean and ugly ones so they are ruled out anyway. The triangle of acceptable men, then, which he defines as either nice or handsome is naturally only a small portion of all the men you can meet. And the nice and handsome men are an even smaller part of all the men available. Therefore, the chance of meeting a nice and handsome man has to be quite small logically. If you substitute the two axes from 'ugly' to 'handsome' and 'mean' to 'nice' with 'bad' to 'good' and 'classic' to 'popular', you end up with a similar situation for literary works. If you want to look up the whole reasoning, either read the book or look up Berkson's fallacy. Here goes Ellenberg and his answer seems quite intelligent to me:
"Literary snobbery works the same way. You know how popular novels are terrible? It's because the masses don't appreciate quality. It's because the Great Sphere of Novels, and the only novels you ever hear about are the ones in the Acceptable Triangle, which are either popular or good."
To sum up, I enjoyed reading How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking a lot, not only because I agree with what Ellenberg writes to a large extent. No matter if you are interested in mathematics or not, you will probably find this book quite interesting and will probably (not certainly, of course!) not be sorry about picking it up. 4 stars.
Jordan Ellenberg, professor of
We're not talking about addition and subtraction here, or even algebra or calculus. Well, a little calculus. And some geometry. But stop, don't run away, it's really not that scary. Because mostly what we're talking about - what Ellenberg is talking about in this book - is the way math works, the way that math shapes the world, and the way we can use math to change the way we interact with the world.
He uses the story of Abraham Wald in the introduction, to suck you in to his way of thinking. Wald was a mathematician working for the military during the Second World War when they came to him with a problem. Here are the planes that come back covered in bullet holes, the generals said. We need you to tell us where to put the armor. The generals were figuring somewhere on the wings, which was where there were more bullet holes than anywhere else. But Wald said, no, you put the armor on the engines. Why? Because the planes with bullet holes in the wings came back. The ones with bullets in the engines? They weren't flying home at all.
That kind of logic is at the core of what Ellenberg is teaching with this book. And I gotta say, it's pretty effective. By the end of the book, I understood for the first time the point of purely theoretical math.* Also, I kind of want to play with non-Euclidean geometry. And not in a Lovecraftian way, for once.
As a bonus, Ellenberg is pretty damn entertaining while he's teaching. Examples range from baseball statistics to politics to con artists, and the book is liberally scattered with amusing footnotes. For example, from a description of how not to add percentages, using the Florida 2000 election as an illustration:
Yes, I, too, know that one guy who thought both Gore and Bush were tools of the capitalist overlords and it didn't make a difference who won. I am not talking about that guy.
He also uses an XKCD cartoon as an example. So he's obviously a man of refined and distinguished tastes.
I could get all dramatic and say that this is an important book and everyone should read it because it will help them - to paraphrase the title - be less wrong all the time, but that would sound preachy, and I hate that. Instead I shall say that this is a massively enlightening and entertaining book, and if you like having your mind blown but always suffered through trig by looking things up in the back of the book and praying you'd remember the formulas long enough to get through the test, you might enjoy How Not To Be Wrong more than you might think.
*It's because math is based on a very few basic principles, out of which you can create complex structures, but because there are so few building blocks those complex structures tend to generalize well. So you do some math to describe one thing, and then you elaborate on that math in a purely theoretical way, and then it turns out that the same math describes a completely different thing. Which is kind of mind-blowing, really.
I was hooked in the title of the introduction: "When Am I Going To Use This?", and then he went on to
The book is about mathematical thinking, aimed at the non-mathematician. The author explains the focus of the book by dividing math into 4 areas, Simple and Shallow (like 1+2=3), Complicated and Shallow (like how to multiply 2 10-digit numbers), Complicated and Profound (like Fermat's Last Theorem), and Simple and Profound (what this book is about). He reassures the reader that "No formal math beyond arithmetic will be required, though lots of math way beyond arithmetic will be explained."
It has already quoted from the Cato Institute, Ferris Bueller, Iron Man and Tony Stark, John von Neumann, Archimedes, Zeno, Milton Friedman, Cauchy, Pythagoras, Isaac Newton and George Berkeley, and Mark Twain. There is history near and far. It is hard to put this book down, but I have other things to do today. But I could not contain my utter admiration for this book any longer - LOVING IT!
Some sample quotes:
"A basic rule of mathematical life: if the universe hands you a hard problem, try to solve an easier one instead, and hope the simple version is close enough to the original problem that the universe doesn't object."
"When we teach mathematics, we are supposed to be explaining how to be that guide [on whether the answer makes sense]. A math course that fails to do so is essentially training the student to be a very slow, buggy version of Microsoft Excel."
"We don't need to teach students how to extract square roots by hand, or in their head (though the latter skill, I can tell you from long personal experience, makes a great party trick in sufficiently nerdy circles)."
There is a lot of wisdom in this book, for someone who is 35 years of age
You can safely ignore this. You don't have to be a math nerd to enjoy and get a great deal out of this book. In fact, it's
To say that Ellenberg can teach you what calculus is on a single page is a bit much. But it's kind of true. More importantly, he will show you why calculus is important to know and understand, just to evaluate the world around you. The book addresses statistical analysis more than other areas of math, with many specific examples of how using a proper understanding of stats and probabilities can make your political and health news reading more informative.
This book helps people understand why math isn't for mathematicians. It also answers the age-old question of math class, "When am I ever going to use this stuff?".
Ellenberg also has a nice, breezy style of writing. He makes the subject reachable via his words, not just their content.
Great book. This is probably closer to a 4.5 than 4 stars.
Some of his examples like the Baltimore Stockbroker are just fascinating. All in all an eminently readable book; however, the Math in it is a little tougher than one is led to believe:-)
In other examples, he shows how difficult (impossible?) it is to measure “public opinion” by illustrating the paradoxes that arise whenever three choices instead of two are presented to any electorate. He also discusses the imprecision of measurement and how that affected the 2000 presidential election in Florida. Another chapter demonstrates the mathematics behind the insights of Renaissance painters who figured out how to create a three dimensional perspective on to a two dimensional canvas.
Evaluation: If you enjoyed Freakonomics or The Signal and the Noise, you should read this book as well.
(JAB)
I say this because I don’t know much math, and I can’t pretend that now I do. But if I did, I’d say, “See, this is why....”
And no book that is filled with things that are true is a waste of space, even if it’s naturally not a substitute for a completely different kind of book.
One real strength of this book is that it doesn't throw in dumb jokes to make the topic seem more accessible; it has many smart, rather snarky jokes about the actual subject matter. The hand drawn graphs are often quite clever, and sometimes funny, also.
The first chapter is about the perils of the pitfalls of implicit linearity. It includes remarks on the Laffer curve and directed me toward an essay by Martin Gardner. Excellent points made. Now I'll be ready to tell someone "That implicit assumption of linearity is questionable." instead of just rolling my eyes.
Ellenberg does make some reasonable arguments; I particularly liked the explanations on the three
And most of the time he does a reasonable job of getting his points across using mathematical explanations and details revealing the hidden maths of every day life. But the book suffers from a lack of direction at times it and it regularly jumps into very complex explanations, which some will find difficult. In this sort of book, you also need to stick to one subject at a time, and it sadly flits back and forth as you go through the book.
There are other books out there that are much better at explaining the way that maths affects us.