Who's Counting?
Uniting Numbers and Narratives with Stories from Pop Culture, Puzzles, Politics, and More
Published on 15. September 2022
232 pages
978-1-63388-813-5 (ISBN)
Description
For decades, New York Times best-selling author John Allen Paulos has enlightened readers by showing how to make sense of the numbers and probabilities behind real-world events, political calculations, and everyday personal decisions. Who's Counting? features dozens of his insightful essays-original writings on contemporary issues like the COVID-19 pandemic, online conspiracy theories, "fake news," and climate change, as well as a selection of enduring columns from his popular ABC News column of the same name.
With an abiding respect for reason, a penchant for puzzles with societal implications, and a disarming sense of humor, Paulos does in this collection what he's famous for: clarifies mathematical ideas for everyone and shows how they play a role in government, media, popular culture, and life. He argues that if we can't critically interpret numbers and statistics, we lose one of our most basic and reliable guides to reality.
With an abiding respect for reason, a penchant for puzzles with societal implications, and a disarming sense of humor, Paulos does in this collection what he's famous for: clarifies mathematical ideas for everyone and shows how they play a role in government, media, popular culture, and life. He argues that if we can't critically interpret numbers and statistics, we lose one of our most basic and reliable guides to reality.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
File size
0,62 MB
ISBN-13
978-1-63388-813-5 (9781633888135)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
John Allen Paulos
Who's Counting?
Uniting Numbers and Narratives with Stories from Pop Culture, Puzzles, Politics, and More
Book
10/2022
Prometheus Books
€19.70
Shipment within 3-4 weeks
Person
John Allen Paulos is an extensively praisedauthor, popular public speaker, and former monthly columnist for ABCNews.com, the Scientific American, and the Guardian. Professor of math at Temple University in Philadelphia, he earned his Ph.D. in the subject from the University of Wisconsin.
He is the author, most recently, of A Numerate Life, as well as New York Times-bestseller Innumeracy, among many others. His papers on probability, logic, and the philosophy of science have appeared in numerous academic journals and his articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, the Nation, Discover, the American Scholar, and the London Review of Books. Paulos and has an extensive web and media presence, especially on Twitter @johnallenpaulos.
He is the author, most recently, of A Numerate Life, as well as New York Times-bestseller Innumeracy, among many others. His papers on probability, logic, and the philosophy of science have appeared in numerous academic journals and his articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, the Nation, Discover, the American Scholar, and the London Review of Books. Paulos and has an extensive web and media presence, especially on Twitter @johnallenpaulos.
Content
- Intro
- PRAISE FOR WHO'S COUNTING? UNITING NUMBERS AND NARRATIVES WITH STORIES FROM POP CULTURE, PUZZLES, POLITICS, AND MORE
- Title
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Introduction
- CHAPTER 1: Puzzles as a Prelude
- The Monty Hall Puzzle: Variants of It and Its Connection to a COVID-19 Precaution
- Wanna Be President? Pass This Test
- Now Featuring e: Pi Has Long Been in the Spotlight. What about e?
- Put on Your Hats and Codes: A Hat Puzzle and Error-Correcting Codes
- Scaling Up Is So Very Hard to Do
- Scaling in Biology, Metabolic Rates, and a Puzzle about Evolutionary Time
- Five or Six Reasons Why Parity Puzzles Are Fun
- Course Loads: Average Paradoxes That Went to College
- Parrando's Paradox: Losing plus Losing Equals Winning
- CHAPTER 2: A Bit of Probability
- Probability and Independent Events: A Mini-Tutorial
- Collecting a Complete Set: Baseball Cards, Disease, and Denial of Service
- Probability and Hitting Streaks: Does DiMaggio's Deserve an Asterisk?
- How Many Ways: From Social Distancing to an Alternative Solution to the Birthday Problem
- Conditional Probability (Because We Usually Know Things) and the Prosecutor's Fallacy
- Four Times the Odds of Conviction Not Four Times as Likely and Other Distinctions
- Randonauts and Coincidences, Fun and Nonsense
- Calculating the Probability of Picking the Wrong Suspect
- COVID-19: False Positives, Fatality Rates, and Base Rates
- Future World: Privacy, Terrorists, and Pre-Perpetrators
- Summer and Boys: A New, Very Counterintuitive Birthday Paradox
- CHAPTER 3: Lies and Logic
- Lying Brain Teasers: Politicians, Liars, and Mathematical Puzzles
- Logical Liars, Paradoxical Politicians, and Smullyan's Stumper
- Groucho Meets Russell
- True If and Only If False in the Market and in Life
- Oh No. Denials and Conditional Statements Often Counterproductive
- The Ellsberg and St. Petersburg Paradoxes: Risks, Utility, and Our Desire for Certainty
- Justifiably Believing That Something Is True Doesn't Mean You Know It
- Prove This, Win $1,000,000! The Goldbach and Collatz Conjectures and a Doable Puzzle
- A Clever Card Trick and a Religious Hoax
- Does the Declaration of Independence Guarantee Happiness?
- Weird Science from the Hume and Bacon Institute
- CHAPTER 4: Calculations and Miscalculations
- From Dates and Y2K to People and PY2K: A Tale of Two Numbers
- Apophenia and Spherical Cows: Clots and Coincidences
- COVID, Calculus, and the Curve
- Hoarding Medicines to Wearing Masks: Sociology, Public Health, and the Prisoner's Dilemma
- Of Ants, Butterflies, and Economic Whimsy
- There's Nothing Wrong with Fuzzy Math
- Predicting Success? SAT Scores and College Grades and the Other SAT, the Soccer Assessment Test
- Be Careful What You Measure and Try to Achieve-You Might Succeed
- Sexonomics: Prostitutes' Incomes, a Nonmoralistic Account
- Sex, Lies, and Statistics: Some Musings
- Reductio: Abortion through the Looking Glass
- Misunderstandings: Jesus' Genealogical Descendants, Sexual Predators, and Home Run Records
- CHAPTER 5: Partisanship in Politics
- Trump: Outrage Fatigue, Denial-of-Service Attacks, and Brandolini's Law of Refutation
- Wolf's Dilemma and Extreme Lockstep Political Partisanship
- Through a Mathnifying Glass Darkly
- Ranked Choice Voting: More Welcoming to Moderate and Less Conducive to Extreme Candidates
- Ties and Coin Flips: From Butterfly Ballots to Butterfly Effects
- Voting Blocs: Red States, Blue States, and a Model for Thoughtless Voting
- The Internet, Conspiracy Theories, and Cognitive Foibles, Including the Conjunction Fallacy
- After 9-11: Mindlessly Searching for Numerological Meaning in the Midst of Tragedy
- CHAPTER 6: Religious Dogmatism
- Naturally Evolving Order and Probability versus the Claims of Intelligent Design
- On the Quasi Apotheosis of Mathematical Ideas, Two Accounts-One Silly, the Other Serious
- Holy Cow or Bull? ELSes: It Would Be Astonishing If One Didn't Find Hidden Messages in the Bible
- Edgar Cayce: An American Prophet-Yeah, Right
- Medieval Blasphemy Law Just Passed in Modern Ireland
- Ramsey Theory and the Profound Idea of Order for Free
- Chaitin on Complexity, Randomness, and Inevitable Incompleteness
- My Dreamy Instant Message Exchange with God(dess)
- CHAPTER 7: Mathematically Flavored Books
- Metaphors-R-Us and the Origin of Mathematical Concepts
- Mathematics and Narrative: A Multifaceted Relationship
- Fractal Find: Monk Discovered Mathematical Formula 700 Years Earlier Than Previously Thought
- The Mathematical Brain: We All Have an Innate Sense of Numbers and Magnitudes
- Infinity and Eternity: A Novelist's Math, a Physicist's Drama
- Stephen Gould's Use of Math Clarifies His Insights on Baseball, Bacteria, and IQ
- Nudging: How to Get People to Do the Right Thing-Maybe
- Wolfram's New Kind of Science: Simple Rules Can Generate All the Complexity We See
- Penrose's Road to Reality: A Behemoth on Modern Math and Physics-Reader Caution Advised
- Is the Sky Falling? And if So, When? A Probabilistic Doomsday Argument
- Postscript
