Mathematics Minus Fear: How to Make Math Fun and Beneficial to Your Everyday Life

Forget your classroom nightmares and discover how numbers can enhance your world

How can math help you bet on horses or win in Vegas? What’s the foolproof way to solve Sudoku? How can probability teach you to calculate your chances of survival in Russian roulette?          

In this irreverent and entertaining guide to mathematics, Lawrence Potter takes the fear out of everything from long division to percentages. Using fascinating puzzles and surprising examples, from M.C. Escher to Pascal, he shows us how math is connected with the world we encounter every day, from how to calculate a tip to why weather forecasts are wrong, from winning at Monopoly to improving your mental arithmetic.

Along the way you’ll also discover who invented numbers, whether animals can count, and what nuns have to do with multiplication.

Lawrence Potter attended Oxford University and graduated with a degree in classics  before becoming an adventurous mathematics teacher in Romania and Rwanda. He is the author of This May Help You Understand the World and lives in London.