Jordan Ellenberg covers a lot of ground in this exploration of applied mathematics. I found the chapters on probability and statistics most entertaining. The application of math to gambling has been going on for centuries. This book might not help you pick the Super Bowl winner, but it might prevent you from wasting your money buying lottery tickets or slinking home broke from a casino. GRADE: B+
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Introduction: When Am I Going To Use This?
Part I: LINEARITY
1. Less Like Sweden
2. Straight Locally, Curved Globally
3. Everyone is Obese
4. How Much is That in Dead Americans?
5. More Pie Than Plate
Part II: INFERENCE
6. The Baltimore Stockbroker and the Bible Code
7. Dead Fish Don’t Read Minds
8. Reductio ad Unlikely
9. The International Journal of Haruspicy
10. Are You There, God? It’s Me, Bayesian Inference
Part III: EXPECTATION
11. What To Expect When You’re Expecting To Win The Lottery
12. Miss More Planes!
13. Where the Train Tracks Meet
Part IV: REGRESSION
14. The Triumph of Mediocrity
15. Galton’s Ellipse
16. Does Lung Cancer Make You Smoke Cigarettes?
Part V: EXISTENCE
17. There Is No Such Thing As Public Opinion
18. “Out of nothing I have created a strange new universe”
Conclusion: How To Be Right
Love those chapter titles! As my husband says each week when I buy a Powerball ticket, “We’ve been buying these tickets for so long, surely our numbers would come up by now!”
Deb, those Powerball odds–175 million to 1–are long, but I bought a ticket! Someone always beats the odds (but it’s rarely me).
Especially now the jackpot is close to $300 million!
it ate my comment
So that one posts. Very annoying.
Speak up, Jeff.
I give up. I typed out a second long response about gambling, lotteries, etc. and it ate it.
Jeff, I tell my students that casinos and lotteries are taxes on people failed math.
The internet must be behaving very strangely in Florida today.
Yawn.