Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences | John Allen Paulos

Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences | John Allen Paulos | An Interesting Read

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Innumeracy: Mathem...

	Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences John Allen Paulos Hill and Wang, 2001 - 208 pages average customer review:based on 78 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Why do even well-educated people understand so little about mathematics? And what are the costs of our innumeracy? John Allen Paulos, in his celebrated bestseller first published in 1988, argues that our inability to deal rationally with very large numbers and the probabilities associated with them results in misinformed governmental policies, confused personal decisions, and an increased susceptibility to pseudoscience of all kinds. Innumeracy lets us know what we're missing, and how we can do something about it.

Sprinkling his discussion of numbers and probabilities with quirky stories and anecdotes, Paulos ranges freely over many aspects of modern life, from contested elections to sports stats, from stock scams and newspaper psychics to diet and medical claims, sex discrimination, insurance, lotteries, and drug testing. Readers of Innumeracy will be rewarded with scores of astonishing facts, a fistful of powerful ideas, and, most important, a clearer, more quantitative way of looking at their world.

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Very good book

I felt like I knew about numbers before the book, and now I realize that I need to review and study numbers! I asked a bunch of friends about some of the simple problems in the book and found that many of them could not figure it out! Definitely read this

An Interesting Read

This was an interesting book that I would highly recommend to anyone NOT number-savvy. I had heard good things about it, and as someone who appreciates the importance of math, I thought it would be great to check out. It was written with the lay-person as its target audience, so being someone who already knows a great deal of mathematics, I was underwhelmed. The book is clearly written, and explains concepts slowly and carefully as it illustrates every-day math for the common person.

Honestly, this book felt a bit like "See Spot Run," but for mathematics instead of the English language. Even though it was a bit boring for the mathematically inclined, I highly recommend it for anyone suffering from "Mathematical Illiteracy." If you have ever said to yourself "I'm not a numbers person," then this book is for you.

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Good despite the self-referential inference to innumeracy

An otherwise interesting, thoughtful book is marred by the phrase that seems obligatory in most popular mathematical books, "the occasional difficult passage can be ignored with impunity." As the title suggests, this book addresses the general public's inability to deal with numbers and their uses. To provide another excuse for avoiding "difficult" mathematics really tends to defeat the purpose of the book and could possibly be considered as a psychological "put down." Are these passages really important to the reader or are they in some manner more important to the author and merely serve to distract the reader? Most often, as is the case in this book, such passages have reasonably comprehensible explanations. Why not use the space to provide another paragraph of explanation?
With this initial hurdle addressed, it should be pointed out that Paulos does a very good job in presenting interesting examples of the use and misuse of numbers, many of which are used in our society, and to some extent are being used to shape it. For example, consider the fact that in general female workers earn approximately 59% the salary of males, which has been used as the argument for stiff equal pay legislation. This fact alone does not take into account the additional information that a greater percentage of women work part-time and many have only recently entered the job market and so have yet to work their way up the hierarchical job ladder. Many other examples deal with the continued popularity of pseudoscience, despite the alternative "reality" that all the "evidence" for it can easily be explained by random variations in the data.
Written in the author's relaxed style and sporting an occasional pun, this book should be read by anyone concerned with the general lack of mathematical sophistication among the general public. Unfortunately, the conditional probability that a person will read it, given that they are themselves innumerate, is no doubt quite low.

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Must-Reading

"Innumeracy" goes beyond the expectation of a non-mathematician, user-friendly book. It wakes up your awareness of what passes as "statistics", "experts", "economics", and various numeric analysis in the popular media.

I bought the book after seeing it referenced in another science book. I was interested in a basis for how much bias, or straight ignorance, was posing in the guise of expert. I was more than satisfied with "Innumeracy" in this regard.

Read it twice. Put it down for a month, pay attention to what's in the news, etc. then read it again. You will be a much better consumer of numbers.

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Good ... but starting to show its age

I have read several "mathematics for a popular audience" books as a high school math teacher who has done graduate work in mathematics. This is considered a classic, but I felt like it was no longer up to date at times. Also, I had the feeling I had read many of the better examples and such in other places - again this book is now a classic. It is good, but I have read similar books that I enjoyed more.

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