The Math of Life and Death
7 Mathematical Principles That Shape Our Lives
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A brilliant and entertaining mathematician illuminates seven mathematical principles that shape our lives. “Kit Yates shows how our private and social lives are suffused by mathematics. Ignorance may bring tragedy or farce. This is an exquisitely interesting book. It’s a deeply serious one too and, for those like me who have little math, it’s delightfully readable.” —Ian McEwan, author of Atonement “Kit Yates is a natural storyteller. Through fascinating stories and examples, he shows how maths is the beating heart of so much of modern life. An exciting new voice in the world of science communication.” —Marcus du Sautoy, author of The Music of the Primes From birthdays to birth rates to how we perceive the passing of time, mathematical patterns shape our lives. But for those of us who left math behind in high school, the numbers and figures hurled at us as we go about our days can sometimes leave us scratching our heads and feeling as if we’re fumbling through a mathematical minefield. In this eye-opening and extraordinarily accessible book, mathematician Kit Yates illuminates hidden principles that can help us understand and navigate the chaotic and often opaque surfaces of our world. In The Math of Life and Death, Yates takes us on a fascinating tour of everyday situations and grand-scale applications of mathematical concepts, including exponential growth and decay, optimization, statistics and probability, and number systems. Along the way he reveals the mathematical undersides of controversies over DNA testing, medical screening results, and historical events such as the Chernobyl disaster and the Amanda Knox trial. Readers will finish this book with an enlightened perspective on the news, the law, medicine, and history, and will be better equipped to make personal decisions and solve problems with math in mind, whether it’s choosing the shortest checkout line at the grocery store or halting the spread of a deadly disease.
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Good grief, an alternate title could very well be “2020: all the ways the world will quantitatively fall apart.”
Ok first off, my copy is titled ‘The Maths of Life and Death', now technically as an Australian who speaks the kings English I should be pronouncing it ‘maths' but you know what? ‘Math' sounds better and also makes more sense etymologically, so I'm going to defensively stick to math.
Now to the book, it's a series of standalone articles about how math (and numbers more broadly) influences real world events. This is anything from evidence in court, algorithms optimising your feed, news agents reporting “facts”, and a whole heap more.
Each article includes a fairly easy to read explanation of the different number principles being discussing (whether it's statistics, probabilities, or even the concept of numbers themselves), so it's a nice primer to understand the concepts and see how it applies to reality. Plus because it's articles, it's very easy to put down and pick up again when the mood strikes for some more math.
No Formulas. Just Numb3rs. In this book about how math shapes our lives, British math professor Yates doesn't take us into the algebra, geometry, and even trigonometry that we all use daily - whether we realize it or not. Instead, he takes an approach similar to the now decade old US television show Numb3rs, starring David Krumholtz and Rob Morrow, wherein he shows applications of higher level mathematics in fields such as epidemiology, medicine, law, journalism, elections, and several others. Yates cites real world examples including unjust convictions and Ebola outbreaks and many others to show how math was used incorrectly and what the math actually showed in that situation, to help the reader begin to get an overall sense of math without getting bogged down in the technical calculations. Truly an excellent book for even the more arithmophobic among us, as it shows the numbers all around us and explains how we can have a better sense of them.
Disclaimers: 1) I LOVED Numb3rs back in the day and would still be watching it if it were still on the air. 2) I have a computer science degree and very nearly got secondary mathematics education and mathematics bachelors degrees at the same time as my CS one - so obviously I'm a bit more attuned to math than others.
