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How Not To Be Wrong: The Power Of Mathematical Thinking (2014)

by Jordan Ellenberg(Favorite Author)

3.86 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

1594205221 (ISBN13: 9781594205224)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Penguin Press HC, The

review 1: I do not really recall why I decided to buy this book, but every so often I have found it useful to read about math and its history. This book did not disappoint. Ellenberg starts out with a simple question: what makes math useful. He then proceeds through a series of everyday problems to provide a history of math, the equations that resolve problems and the logic behind them to illustrate the value of the mathematical thought process.Like reading a book on physics or economics, the value of the book comes from the way of thinking for mathematics. I don’t pretend to fully understand Bayesian inference, non-Euclidean geometry or statistical analysis, but that is not really the point of the book. The value here lies in the way he deploys mathematical reasoning to expl... moreain and solve problems. But it does more than that. In the study of probabilities, we get the history of Pascal, in evaluation of the 2000 election results, we get a description of Condorcet and social sciences and so on. The combination of here and now questions, sometimes silly like the Bible Code, historical portraits of great mathematicians and the logic of their reasoning helps to make the math in the book accessible and enjoyable.
review 2: What a read!Jordan Ellenberg has quite the talent for explaining mathematical concepts in a clear manner. If you have read his columns in Slate, you know what to expect from this book. The central theme of the book is how mathematics surrounds us in our everyday lives, showing up everywhere where reasoning is used to get closer to truth.I will start recommending this book to people I meet who are proud of their mathematical ignorance and who say they never use the mathematics they've learned in schools, to gently guide them to see how wrong that is.The book has been divided into five parts: Linearity, Inference, Expectation, Regression and Existence. In each chapter the author brings up some problem of mathematical nature related to that part, maybe a few mathematicians from history and how they've paved the way for our current understanding of these issues, and ultimately how the problem should be solved. There is a great variety of topics covered in this manner. I found once again that I enjoyed the biographic parts alot, as they tie the otherwise abstract material into our world and culture.In retrospective, the book suffers from one problem: it shies away from showing much of the mathematical language and notation behind these magnificent ideas. I fully understand that this is due to the genre, format and publisher's wishes, but I felt some compact formulas here and there would not have been "too much". I'm afraid the publishing world underestimates how much mathematical notation readers would be comfortable with, especially when it's so clearly spelled out that this is indeed a book about mathematics. Any reader should challenge themselves by looking up the referenced theorems and formulas from the Internet and seeing if they can understand what's going on.There is also fairly heavy emphasis on American cultural concepts and politics in this book, but that's something I've learned to tolerate more and more. Each book from the United States teaches me something new about baseball: thanks to this book I now know what an umpire is, and how their calls might change the outcome of games. Maybe one day I will try to watch a game to see how much I've already gathered from books like this! less

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