Once Upon a Number: The Hidden Mathematical Logic of Stories (Allen Lane Science S.) - Softcover

Paulos, John Allen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140281797 ISBN 13: 9780140281798

Publisher: Penguin, 2000

Synopsis

We can't conceive of things occuring by chance, so we make up stories to explain what has happened. In this entertaining book bestselling author John Allen Paulos shows how mathematical understanding -- or lack of it -- profoundly affects the way weunderstand our world. 'One never knows what delightful surprise is coming next. You will learn a lot from this entertaining yet far from superficial book' - Martin Gardner

About this title

Review

Mathematician John Allen Paulos bravely bridges the scientific and literary cultures with this amusing, enlightening look at numbers and stories. If you think those two things go together like a "horse and a paperclip," as Allen wryly observes, you only have to look at phenomena like the Bible codes, the stock market's ups and downs, and the Clinton sex scandal to begin to understand the hidden bonds between them. Put simply, mathematics can describe everything that happens, and everything that happens contextualizes mathematics. In demonstrating this, Paulos continues the noble numeracy crusade he began with A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper and Innumeracy. Perhaps the most compelling thought experiments in the book are those of the statistics of stereotyping and race relations. Paulos shows, mathematically, that minority status makes achieving equality extraordinarily difficult.

If you want to keep hold of your comfortable worldview, don't read Once Upon a Number. But you'll be missing out on an unforgettable reminder of what chance, coincidence, and odds really mean, along with several valuable life lessons that may help you understand lost socks, racism, and mistaken identity. --Therese Littleton

From the Author

Like at least 62.212% of us, I've often felt a tension between stories and statistics and their very different logics and mind-sets. I've always been struck, for example, by how frequently people feel that they've been wronged or aggrieved and how infrequently they feel that they've wronged or aggrieved someone else. How could we all be so Lake Wobegone above average? This led me to think not only about the differences between narratives and numbers but also about those between subjective viewpoint and objective probability, between informal discourse and formal logic, between meaning and information. The book that resulted, this book, is a sort of mathematician's take on C.P. Snow's two cultures, the literary and the scientific, and is my attempt to bridge, or at least illuminate, the gap between them. The stress is on examples, vignettes, parables, stories, puzzles, and a few memoiristic segments. Topics include the Bible codes, the statistics of racism and stereotyping, twenty questions and "magical realism," the probability of Murphy's Law, the mathematics of humor, O.J. Simpson and the Unabomber, the role of common knowledge in the stock market, information theory versus literary criticism, and much more.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0140281797
• ISBN 13: 9780140281798
• Binding: Paperback