Books by John Allen Paulos

Why do even well-educated people often understand so little about maths - or take a perverse pride in not being a 'numbers person'?In his now-classic book Innumeracy, John Allen Paulos answers questions such as: Why is following the stock market exactly like flipping a coin? How big is a trillion? How fast does human hair grow in mph? Can you calculate the chances that a party includes two people who have the same birthday? Paulos shows us that by arming yourself with some simple maths, you don't have to let numbers get the better of you.

Paulos uses jokes, stories, parables, and anecdotes to elucidate difficult concepts, in this case, some of the fundamental problems in modern philosophy.

Employing intuitive ideas from mathematics, this quirky "e;meta-memoir"e; 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 biography 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 vignettes serve as springboards to many telling perspectives: simple arithmetic puts life-long 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.

Paulos offers a hillarious account of how the stock market both follows and defies mathematical principals. He offers an enagaing overview of everything from "betas" to the efficient market hypothesis.

From crime figures to health scares, election polls to stock market forecasts, numbers make the news all the time. But are they accurate? This title travels through the pages of an average newspaper, revealing how mathematics is at the heart of the articles we read everyday - even horoscopes and the sports pages - and how often they mislead us.