3 Review(s)

'Innumeracy', wrote Isaac Asimov, 'would improve the quality of thinking of virtually anyone'. In his new book, John Allen Paulos continues his liberating campaign against mathematical illiteracy. Although a life-long lover of newspapers, he knows they never give us the truth in black or white. Whatever they tell us about health scares or racial quotas, voting patterns or DNA testing, it is certain to be simplified. Advertisers and spin doctors make conscious efforts to deceive us, and even profiles, reviews and recipes need to be taken with a large pinch of salt. It is here that we could all use a grounding in mathematics. Chaos theory, for example, reveals instantly why it is pointless to predict economic or environmental trends. 'Mathematical naïveté,' writes Paulos, 'can put readers at a disadvantage in thinking about many issues in the news that may not seem to involve mathematics at all.' His book offers the liveliest and most entertaining of remedies.