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Cargando... A Numerate Life: A Mathematician Explores the Vagaries of Life, His Own and Probably Yourspor John Allen Paulos
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Employing intuitive ideas from mathematics, this quirky "meta-memoir" raises questions about our lives that most of us don't think to ask, but arguably should- what part of memory is reliable fact, what part creative embellishment? Which favorite presuppositions are unfounded, which statistically biased? By conjoining two opposing mindsets--the suspension of disbelief required in storytelling and the skepticism inherent in the scientific method--bestselling mathematician John Allen Paulos has created an unusual hybrid, a composite of personal memories and mathematical approaches to re-evaluating them. Entertaining vignettes from Paulos's life abound--ranging from a bullying math teacher and a fabulous collection of baseball cards to romantic crushes, a grandmother's petty larceny, and his quite unintended role in getting George Bush elected president in 2000. These stories serve as springboards to many telling perspectives, utilizing math as a vehicle- simple arithmetic puts lifelong habits in a dubious new light; higher dimensional geometry helps us see that we're all rather peculiar; nonlinear dynamics explains the narcissism of small differences cascading into very different siblings; logarithms and exponentials yield insight on why we tend to become bored and jaded as we age; and there are tricks and jokes, probability and coincidences, and much more. For fans of Paulos or newcomers to his work, this witty commentary on his life--and yours--is fascinating reading. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)510.92Natural sciences and mathematics Mathematics General Mathematics Biography And History BiographyClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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So Paulos, at the age of 70 - he's older than I had in my head, despite reading him for nearly 30 years - sets out to collect some of his life observations and flesh them out to a larger examination of the life worth living. It's not a long book - 192 pages plus cites and an index, but there is a lot here. I'll just list the chapter titles and subtitles in case that prompts an interest.
1) Bully Teacher, Childhood Math: some early estimates, speculations
2) Bias, Biography, and Why We're All a Bit Far-out and Bizarre: bias mindsets, statistics and biography
3) Ambition vs. Nihilism: infinity, sets , and immortality
4) Life's Shifting Shapes: primitive math, life trajectories, and curve fitting
5) Moving Toward the Unexpected Middle: a few touchstone memories
6) Pivots - Past to Present: Kovalevsky, prediction, and my gramdmother's petty larceny
7) Romance Among the Trans-humans and us Cis-humans: roboromance and the end of biography
8) Chances Are the Chances Are: if only...probability and coincidences, good, bad, and ugly
9) Lives in the Era of Numbers and Networks: how many e-mails, where did we buy that- the quantified life
10) My Stock Loss, Hypocrisy, and A Card Trick: my stock loss and a few pitfalls of narrative logic
11) Biographies: Verstehen or Superficial: consciousness, biographies, and shmata
12) Trips, Memories, and Becoming Jaded: topology, travel, and a Thai taxi driver
A few of the many parts I marked and margin-noted...
That last paragraph speaks to me. And sometimes I am labeled "negative" or "curmudgeon" for it. On observed moments in our lives: I've mused and groused about artificial milestones many times! (...knowing full well the artificiality of "mile"stones!)
One part I won't detail here, for it's a bit long, demonstrated an interesting aspect of probability - something humans have a difficult time with, but I'll summarize: if one has two people with a tendency to not always tell the truth, the probability of them both telling a lie independently is easily calculated (after assuming some factors of truthiness). But...and this is important in 2017/18...particularly early October 2018, if the second person says something in support of something the first said, the probability that whatever that first person said is true goes way down! On mortality To which I always add my question: "How many more books can I read?"
So, the non-linearity did not bother me, and the maths are always stimulating - even if I don't share his love of topology (Martin Gardner was another aficionado) or have ever really understood Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem - and I enjoyed the story, connected with many of the revelations, and found a few more books to add to my List.
Recommended. ( )