Status
Available
Call number
Collection
Publication
Basic Books (1995), Edition: First Edition, Hardcover, 224 pages
Description
In this lively volume, mathematician John Allen Paulos employs his singular wit to guide us through an unlikely mathematical jungle--the pages of the daily newspaper. From the Senate and sex to celebrities and cults, Paulos takes stories that may not seem to involve math at all and demonstrates how mathematical naïveté can put readers at a distinct disadvantage. Whether he's using chaos theory to puncture economic and environmental predictions, applying logic to clarify the hazards of spin doctoring and news compression, or employing arithmetic and common sense to give us a novel perspective on greed and relationships, Paulos never fails to entertain and enlighten.
User reviews
LibraryThing member thornton37814
Paulos takes the reader on a mathematical tour of the newspaper. From the headline stories and elections to recipes and celebrity stories, it's all included in the sketches in this book. Paulos is certain to touch on something that is found in the newspaper that each person will enjoy -- celebrity
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gossip, election results, recipes, crime stories, health care, education, books and reading, top 10 lists, maps, gun control, forensics, etc. Some stories can be enjoyed by the average reader; others require a little more of a mathematical background to understand how math is involved in the story. It was quite an interesting book. He designed to be read like a newspaper -- where one can skip to whichever section interests him most. While I may not agree with Paulos' position on certain issues in the book, the book is an interesting read. Show Less
LibraryThing member justindtapp
The book is about 200 pages but has over 50 chapters. So, each chapter reads sort of like a blog entry. It was published in 1994, before blogs, so it made him more money than simply blogging his thoughts now would. Each chapter are his thoughts after reading particular articles in the newspaper and
The author loves the newspaper but is also critical of journalists and publishers. His overall point is that we, as readers, should "Always be smart; seldom be certain." Knowledge of basic statistics help insulate us against having our decisions influenced by journalists that don't always ask the right questions and almost never reveal their biases.
One of the author's previous books (Innumeracy) was a bestseller about how/why American kids aren't getting proper mathematics training and what the consequences could be. He has a paragraph about that in this book, mentions that the way mathematics is taught in school today is equivalent to teaching literature solely by analyzing and focusing on punctuation. Thus, most students (like myself) never see the big picture and all the wonderful uses of mathematics beyond calculation and engineering.
I give the book 2.75 stars of 5. He mentions Chaos Theory a couple of times, which yet again tantalizes me to find a good book on the subject.
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introduce various mathematical theories and statistical concepts that would add some much-needed info to the articles.The author loves the newspaper but is also critical of journalists and publishers. His overall point is that we, as readers, should "Always be smart; seldom be certain." Knowledge of basic statistics help insulate us against having our decisions influenced by journalists that don't always ask the right questions and almost never reveal their biases.
One of the author's previous books (Innumeracy) was a bestseller about how/why American kids aren't getting proper mathematics training and what the consequences could be. He has a paragraph about that in this book, mentions that the way mathematics is taught in school today is equivalent to teaching literature solely by analyzing and focusing on punctuation. Thus, most students (like myself) never see the big picture and all the wonderful uses of mathematics beyond calculation and engineering.
I give the book 2.75 stars of 5. He mentions Chaos Theory a couple of times, which yet again tantalizes me to find a good book on the subject.
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LibraryThing member setnahkt
Sadly dated; what we need now is A Mathematician Surfs the Web. Paulos is reasonably non-doctrinaire, with examples that should annoy or outrage any political persuasion – although he’s careful not to say he actually advocates some of the positions that are statistically justifiable (example:
Overall, though, it’s a collection of interesting essays of variable quality rather than a coherent book. Most of the mathematical discussions are too brief; a reader might remember the point made but not the method. I suppose it’s a variant on the claim that “The correct answer to Creationism is a geology textbook”; the correct answer to most media innumeracy is not a clever little selection of essays but a statistics textbook.
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an estimate that if all smokers switched to chewing tobacco, there would be a 98% reduction in tobacco-related deaths). His chapter on non-linear dynamics and chaos is directed at Reagonomics – it’s ironic that the substitution of a few words would make it equally applicable to climate change. (A later chapter on the logistic formula for animal population growth is also applicable to climate change as well as endangered species, demonstrating that apparently minor changes in input parameters can make dramatic differences in outcome).Overall, though, it’s a collection of interesting essays of variable quality rather than a coherent book. Most of the mathematical discussions are too brief; a reader might remember the point made but not the method. I suppose it’s a variant on the claim that “The correct answer to Creationism is a geology textbook”; the correct answer to most media innumeracy is not a clever little selection of essays but a statistics textbook.
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LibraryThing member herschelian
"Mathematical naivete can put readers at a disadvantage in thinking about many issues in the news that may not seem to involve mathematics at all" says the author of this absolutely fascinating book. He shows how whatever figures are tossed out in the press when writing about health scares, racial
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quotas, voting patterns, DNA testing have been simplified to the point where they have little validity at all. Read this to inform yourself and to help you read reports in the media with a very large pinch of salt. Show Less
LibraryThing member jpsnow
I really enjoyed this work. The author proves to the reader that math is not about numbers but about thinking and logic. Covering a wide range of general examples, he brings home the concepts of probability, game theory (voting, poltical territory), chaos (economic forecasting, epidemics, markets),
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non-linearity, logic, and the complexity horizon. He also brings out the finer points regarding interpretation and use of analytical tools: precision (re: recipes), anchoring, checking for reasonability, small sample size, etc. Few of the concepts were new to me, but the presentation is entertaining and some of those concepts are explained better than I have seen. For example, the Central Limit Theorem: "the average of a large bunch of measurements follows a normal bell-shaped curve even if the individual measurements themselves do not." Show Less
LibraryThing member MusicMom41
I bought this book several years ago and never got around to reading it. Therefore the news stories he talked about were old news—but at least familiar to me. However the currency of the stories had little to do with his premise that most people don’t recognize much of the bias in news
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reporting because they are not familiar with how math influences the reporting. Also, they often don’t recognize if the numbers quoted were really the result of valid testing or just thrown out to bolster a (probably weak) argument. I was able to follow some of the math but not all. What I chiefly learned is that all the math I learned way back in school actually taught me to be a more critical reader—and a more skeptical one. I am always questioning the validity of arguments and on what basis they are made. I also notice that many people will take what they read as “gospel”—because if it’s in the paper it must be true! Most people don’t recognize false correlations because they’ve never studied logic. If our nation is going to remain strong we must improve the critical thinking skill of our next generation of voters. They have declined even further since this book was written. Show Less
LibraryThing member heidialice
This is a collection of very short pieces on a variety of topics related to the presentation and interpretation of math and statistics in the news(papers). It is, in essence, a skeptic's toolbox for reading the paper more effectively.
The math is very accessible to the non-specialist reader, and
The math is very accessible to the non-specialist reader, and
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it's written in a light and engaging style. Originally published in 1995, the "currency" has aged a bit, though one can substitute "bank bailout" for "Savings and Loan bailout", etc., and the math still holds. A fun read for those who enjoy math, or those who would like to understand probability and statistics a bit better. Excerpts from this volume would be ideal supplementary material to an undergraduate "math for non-mathematicians" (especially journalism majors) class, especially since many problems, or classes of problems, are suggested in the text. Show Less
LibraryThing member Ella_Jill
This book is a comprised of a series of vignettes which analyze common newspaper stories from the perspective of mathematics, formal logic and human psychology, most of them interesting and worthwhile, although a few meander back and forth, only to deliver commonplace conclusions not particularly
One of the things I learned from this book is the notion of conditional probability. E.g., “the conditional probability that someone is wealthy given that he or she is a cardiologist is very high. The converse conditional probability that someone is a cardiologist given that he or she is wealthy is very low.” This seems obvious, but somehow I’ve never realized before that this also means that although the probability of an innocent person’s fingerprints matching a sample from a crime scene may be one in a million, the probability that a person whose fingerprints do produce a match is nonetheless innocent may still be two in three. However, when Paulos writes that the same is true of DNA samples, I was less prepared to take it at face value. I can well imagine fingerprints to be “a bit hazy and subject to interpretation,” but I have always assumed the data from DNA samples to be precise. (It’s just an assumption, though. I’m not a biologist and don’t have any experience with such samples.)
I agree with Paulos that when journalists use numbers far removed from most people’s everyday life they should “compare them with quantities that are more viscerally appreciated. For example, estimates of the cost of the savings-and-loan bailout have ranged up to $500 billion (including interest payments over time). This translates into $2,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States (again, over time).... Or… $500 billion could buy a transcontinental gold bar weighing about 5.5 pounds a foot.” We could “stretch this gold bar into a rainbow extending from Capitol Hill 1,500 miles up, above the Midwestern prairies and over the Phoenix headquarters of Charles Keating’s failed savings-and-loan empire.... It would take a decade to spend $500 billion at $1,585 a second.” (This book was published in 1995.) However, the author points out in another chapter that a linear measure of a number makes it appear large, while a volume measure of the same number makes it seem small: “although a single tower of nickels stretching from sea level to the height of Mount Everest would contain more than 4 million coins, you can easily verify that this pile would fit comfortably into a cubical box about 6 feet to a side.” This seems hard to believe, but my calculations did confirm it.
Paulos also writes that what’s important is not how many seats a party has in a legislative chamber or what percent of stock somebody owns in a company, but how often that number can be crucial in a vote, which depends on how many other parties/stockholders there are and how many seats/stocks each of them has. That’s probably obvious to businesspersons or people who live in multiparty state systems, but it’s just not something I ever thought about. Similarly, the author discusses that what’s important to politicians is not how many of their constituents are for and how many are against a particular measure, but how many will make a voting choice based on the candidate’s position on this issue. For instance, if the majority of the electorate is for stricter gun control, but among those against it, far more feel so strongly about it that they will vote against any candidate in favor of tighter gun control, a “prudent politician” won’t tackle the issue.
Although not particularly related to mathematics, I think Paulos makes a relevant point when he says:
"…reporters naturally gravitate to where the news is made, and on the federal level that place is Washington, D.C. On the state and local levels, the news comes from the state legislature and City Hall, respectively. Business, being decentralized, is largely invisible. (This is why the $12 million salary of the head of Equitable Life Insurance, for example, is seldom mentioned, even though it just about covers the salary of the entire U.S. Senate – 100 salaries at $138,000 each.) More conspicuous are those businesses synonymous with their locales: Wall Street, Hollywood, Detroit. No longer synonymous with beer, my hometown of Milwaukee almost never makes the national news unless a particularly grisly crime or some natural disaster takes place there; the same holds for most other American cities."
There’s been more attention devoted to private businesses recently, thanks to them getting government bail-outs, but I think largely Paulos’s observation is still current. Personally, I disapprove of the reporters’ habit of congregating in the government offices at all, or of regular press conferences. I don’t think it’s important what politicians say, only what they do, and that’s a matter of public record. (Not to mention that covering a government entity favorably is often a prerequisite for access to its officials.) So I agree with Paulous that newspapers and TV channels would have done us a better service if they fanned out their reporters across the country to actually gather some news instead of lazily writing down whatever platitudes and excuses politicians and government PR staff hand down to them. Nor should foreign news be confined to elections, wars, coups, riots and natural disasters. And, yes, I’ve heard that newspapers don’t have money to keep regular oversee correspondents anymore, but I don’t think keeping them in Washington is any cheaper, and I agree with Paulous that there are too many of them in Washington.
On the other hand, I disagree with him when he writes that environmental hazards, such as “benzene in Perrier water, pesticide residues on vegetables, Alar on apples, asbestos in schools, and chemicals in soil, water and air” are greatly overrated: “Although some of the countless contaminations we hear about may warrant action and justify fear, most are sensationalizing what are essentially trivial hazards.” He suggests “a warning in the same spirit” that reads, “apple seeds contain easily detectable amounts of cyanide, a chemical known to be harmful to humans.” But like the journalists whose work he bemoans in his book, he neglects to point out that a) people normally don’t eat apple seeds when they eat apples; b) apple seeds have tough protective shells to allow them to pass through birds’ and rodents’ stomachs undigested and be ready to germinate; and c) if people actually chewed on as great a volume of apple seeds as the volume of water they drink, they would get poisoned. Personally, I think there’s not anywhere enough emphasis on safe food, water and air, partly because most studies don’t take into account the effect of continual exposure to industrial chemicals over decades and generations, let alone a continual exposure to a combination of countless such chemicals in various combinations. So I was disappointed by the author’s repeated undermining of environmental concerns in this book. However, for the most part, it proved an interesting and useful book.
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related to mathematics. One of the things I learned from this book is the notion of conditional probability. E.g., “the conditional probability that someone is wealthy given that he or she is a cardiologist is very high. The converse conditional probability that someone is a cardiologist given that he or she is wealthy is very low.” This seems obvious, but somehow I’ve never realized before that this also means that although the probability of an innocent person’s fingerprints matching a sample from a crime scene may be one in a million, the probability that a person whose fingerprints do produce a match is nonetheless innocent may still be two in three. However, when Paulos writes that the same is true of DNA samples, I was less prepared to take it at face value. I can well imagine fingerprints to be “a bit hazy and subject to interpretation,” but I have always assumed the data from DNA samples to be precise. (It’s just an assumption, though. I’m not a biologist and don’t have any experience with such samples.)
I agree with Paulos that when journalists use numbers far removed from most people’s everyday life they should “compare them with quantities that are more viscerally appreciated. For example, estimates of the cost of the savings-and-loan bailout have ranged up to $500 billion (including interest payments over time). This translates into $2,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States (again, over time).... Or… $500 billion could buy a transcontinental gold bar weighing about 5.5 pounds a foot.” We could “stretch this gold bar into a rainbow extending from Capitol Hill 1,500 miles up, above the Midwestern prairies and over the Phoenix headquarters of Charles Keating’s failed savings-and-loan empire.... It would take a decade to spend $500 billion at $1,585 a second.” (This book was published in 1995.) However, the author points out in another chapter that a linear measure of a number makes it appear large, while a volume measure of the same number makes it seem small: “although a single tower of nickels stretching from sea level to the height of Mount Everest would contain more than 4 million coins, you can easily verify that this pile would fit comfortably into a cubical box about 6 feet to a side.” This seems hard to believe, but my calculations did confirm it.
Paulos also writes that what’s important is not how many seats a party has in a legislative chamber or what percent of stock somebody owns in a company, but how often that number can be crucial in a vote, which depends on how many other parties/stockholders there are and how many seats/stocks each of them has. That’s probably obvious to businesspersons or people who live in multiparty state systems, but it’s just not something I ever thought about. Similarly, the author discusses that what’s important to politicians is not how many of their constituents are for and how many are against a particular measure, but how many will make a voting choice based on the candidate’s position on this issue. For instance, if the majority of the electorate is for stricter gun control, but among those against it, far more feel so strongly about it that they will vote against any candidate in favor of tighter gun control, a “prudent politician” won’t tackle the issue.
Although not particularly related to mathematics, I think Paulos makes a relevant point when he says:
"…reporters naturally gravitate to where the news is made, and on the federal level that place is Washington, D.C. On the state and local levels, the news comes from the state legislature and City Hall, respectively. Business, being decentralized, is largely invisible. (This is why the $12 million salary of the head of Equitable Life Insurance, for example, is seldom mentioned, even though it just about covers the salary of the entire U.S. Senate – 100 salaries at $138,000 each.) More conspicuous are those businesses synonymous with their locales: Wall Street, Hollywood, Detroit. No longer synonymous with beer, my hometown of Milwaukee almost never makes the national news unless a particularly grisly crime or some natural disaster takes place there; the same holds for most other American cities."
There’s been more attention devoted to private businesses recently, thanks to them getting government bail-outs, but I think largely Paulos’s observation is still current. Personally, I disapprove of the reporters’ habit of congregating in the government offices at all, or of regular press conferences. I don’t think it’s important what politicians say, only what they do, and that’s a matter of public record. (Not to mention that covering a government entity favorably is often a prerequisite for access to its officials.) So I agree with Paulous that newspapers and TV channels would have done us a better service if they fanned out their reporters across the country to actually gather some news instead of lazily writing down whatever platitudes and excuses politicians and government PR staff hand down to them. Nor should foreign news be confined to elections, wars, coups, riots and natural disasters. And, yes, I’ve heard that newspapers don’t have money to keep regular oversee correspondents anymore, but I don’t think keeping them in Washington is any cheaper, and I agree with Paulous that there are too many of them in Washington.
On the other hand, I disagree with him when he writes that environmental hazards, such as “benzene in Perrier water, pesticide residues on vegetables, Alar on apples, asbestos in schools, and chemicals in soil, water and air” are greatly overrated: “Although some of the countless contaminations we hear about may warrant action and justify fear, most are sensationalizing what are essentially trivial hazards.” He suggests “a warning in the same spirit” that reads, “apple seeds contain easily detectable amounts of cyanide, a chemical known to be harmful to humans.” But like the journalists whose work he bemoans in his book, he neglects to point out that a) people normally don’t eat apple seeds when they eat apples; b) apple seeds have tough protective shells to allow them to pass through birds’ and rodents’ stomachs undigested and be ready to germinate; and c) if people actually chewed on as great a volume of apple seeds as the volume of water they drink, they would get poisoned. Personally, I think there’s not anywhere enough emphasis on safe food, water and air, partly because most studies don’t take into account the effect of continual exposure to industrial chemicals over decades and generations, let alone a continual exposure to a combination of countless such chemicals in various combinations. So I was disappointed by the author’s repeated undermining of environmental concerns in this book. However, for the most part, it proved an interesting and useful book.
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LibraryThing member hcubic
John Allen Paulos is author of another book that you may have read or heard about, "Innumeracy", in which he describes the decline in the ability of Americans to perform simple mathematics, even arithmetic. In "A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper", he provides some of the reasons why mathematics is
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important to everyday life. He uses items from daily newspapers and current magazines as "jumping off points" for thoughtful, short essays about applied mathematics. This book is only about 200 pages, and each topic is discussed in easy-to-digest, well-written articles of a few pages each. Busy teachers will find it easy to surf through the book, which can be read in any order. You will find health issues, technological risks, affirmative action, food, sports, and lots of other apparently non-mathematical subjects discussed from the perspective of a professional mathematician and engaging writer. Show Less
LibraryThing member MartinBodek
I love mathematics. I love newspapers. I also love facts, and separating those from fiction, and clarity, and healthy skeptical thinking, and a vigorous dose of humor. This book satisfies all those interests. What's fascinating is that each chapter could be exploded not into just into an entire
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book, but volumes of books. His brevity though, keeps your interest, although he runs way too short on some very interesting topics (only four pages on baseball? Criminal!). Great fun. I have to read more of his work. Show Less
LibraryThing member keylawk
The author is a prolific writer and professional mathematician, who confesses to having an "unnatural attachment to newspapers". Introduction {2}. Structured in sections like a morning gazette, the work examines the mathematical references and arcs of stories "in the news". Published while print
We get most of the "news" wrong. The math is just bad, and our understanding of it is worse. Paulos helps us get through the Politics, the editorials, the predictions, the spin, breakthrough announcements, the events, and even the Food reviews and Obituaries.
After a deep dive into the "information", he points out that little of it is mathematically certain. This book is not going "out of date" soon -- because of the abundance of fascinating examples drawn from the real world we recognize. He concludes with a short word of advice: "Always be smart; seldom be certain."
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media and journalism still flourished, he believes that newspapers foster "rational tendencies" and "will remain our primary means of considered public discourse". Hence the importance of a serious examination of the complexity of our society "in its many quantitative, probabilistic, and dynamic facets".We get most of the "news" wrong. The math is just bad, and our understanding of it is worse. Paulos helps us get through the Politics, the editorials, the predictions, the spin, breakthrough announcements, the events, and even the Food reviews and Obituaries.
After a deep dive into the "information", he points out that little of it is mathematically certain. This book is not going "out of date" soon -- because of the abundance of fascinating examples drawn from the real world we recognize. He concludes with a short word of advice: "Always be smart; seldom be certain."
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LibraryThing member Razinha
Paulos is a witty mathematician and makes excellent points in his analyses of newspapers focusing on the numbers, statistics, ignorance and misrepresentations. Arranged as newspaper content, with politics and current topics first, followed by local news, lifestyles, science, and sports, he writes
I would be curious to ask him what he thinks of Internet news and the Fox News Network. He had faith then that a newspaper was of more value than a television newscast, but that pre-dated the tabloid TV of Murdoch's empire and the deceptive pseudo-statistics they use, so I'm sure he's even more convinced of his original premise.
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short "articles" with composite made up headlines to draw you in; not any different than any newspaper. Published in 1995, the topics and references are dated, but the message is not.I would be curious to ask him what he thinks of Internet news and the Fox News Network. He had faith then that a newspaper was of more value than a television newscast, but that pre-dated the tabloid TV of Murdoch's empire and the deceptive pseudo-statistics they use, so I'm sure he's even more convinced of his original premise.
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LibraryThing member themulhern
This book is a collection of small and intentionally somewhat disconnected articles. They are organized into several main themes:
* Politics, Economics, and the Nation
* Local, Business, and Social Issues
* Lifestyle, Spin, and Soft News
* Science, Medicine, and the Environment
* Food, Book Review,
it's a bit too discursive. I found myself reading bits of the articles after a while, just like flipping channels.
However, I have a more detailed review.
* Politics, Economics, and the Nation - The intro to this was wierd and depressing, because it was about Bosnia, but also about cake cutting so that every body gets a fair portion. The algorithm for that was complicated, and ought to result in a very ragged cake. But it should work, if the cake is infinitely divisible.
- Lani "Quota Queen" Guinier
This was puzzling, because I wasn't paying much attention to politics back then and had never heard of this person. However, it introduced the Bahnzhof power index, which I had never heard of before, even though I do pay attention to voting systems, but which was somewhat mathematically interesting. It also discusses "cumulative voting", which really seems like a generalization of "approval voting".
* Politics, Economics, and the Nation
* Local, Business, and Social Issues
* Lifestyle, Spin, and Soft News
* Science, Medicine, and the Environment
* Food, Book Review,
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Sports, Obituariesit's a bit too discursive. I found myself reading bits of the articles after a while, just like flipping channels.
However, I have a more detailed review.
* Politics, Economics, and the Nation - The intro to this was wierd and depressing, because it was about Bosnia, but also about cake cutting so that every body gets a fair portion. The algorithm for that was complicated, and ought to result in a very ragged cake. But it should work, if the cake is infinitely divisible.
- Lani "Quota Queen" Guinier
This was puzzling, because I wasn't paying much attention to politics back then and had never heard of this person. However, it introduced the Bahnzhof power index, which I had never heard of before, even though I do pay attention to voting systems, but which was somewhat mathematically interesting. It also discusses "cumulative voting", which really seems like a generalization of "approval voting".
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Language
Original publication date
1995
Physical description
224 p.
ISBN
0465043623 / 9780465043620
Other editions
A Mathematician Reads The Newspaper by John Allen Paulos (Paper Book)