Jordan Ellenberg
Author of How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking
About the Author
Jordan Ellenberg is an American Mathematician and is currently the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He was born in 1971 and grew up in Potomac, Maryland. Both of his parents were statisticians, which may have helped Ellenberg excel show more in mathematics from a young age. He competed for the U. S. in the International Mathematical Olympiad three times, winning two gold medals and a silver. After receiving his undergraduate degree from Harvard University in 1993, Ellenberg obtained a master's degree in fiction writing from Johns Hopkins University. He then returned to Harvard to complete his Ph.D. in math. Ellenberg has written both fiction and non-fiction. His novel, The Grasshopper King, was a finalist for the New York Library Young Lions Fiction Award in 2004. He has been writing about math for a general audience for a number of years, and his work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. He also occasionally writes a column entitled "Do the Math" for the on-line magazine Slate. His book, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking was named to multiple bestseller lists. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Works by Jordan Ellenberg
Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else (2021) 459 copies, 11 reviews
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Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1971
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Potomac, Maryland, USA
- Associated Place (for map)
- Maryland, USA
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Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else by Jordan Ellenberg
Ellenberg writes very well, and is both clear and entertaining. I expected that, having read How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking. What I didn't expect was a book that is so relevant to current events. COVID-19, pandemics, and how diseases spread; gerrymandering; the electoral college; voting systems. Also the best checkers player of all time, computer chess and computer go, math education, physics and relativity, math history, maps.... It's a delight from one end to the show more other. And if you don't like math, this books suggests why not (blame it on how you were taught). show less
In order to pick up this book, I guess you have to have at least a faint interest in mathematics. Otherwise, the word 'mathematical' in the title will probably scare you off. However, not being wrong anymore sounds like a good enough prospect to make up for all the maths in the book, right? How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking starts out by giving a reason why mathematical thinking can be a helpful skill in everyone's life and what math can reveal about improving your show more chances to win the lottery, understanding different systems to elect a president, and many more. The titles of chapters such as "Everyone is obese", "How much is that in dead Americans?" or "Miss more planes!" show first, that math can be fun, and second, that the intended audience of the book are not math professors but rather everyone.
Anticipating readers' feeling towards mathematics, Jordan Ellenberg attempts to answer the most-asked question in math classes first: "So, when am I going to use this?" Ellenberg encourages people to look deeper into things and discover the math in our everyday lives. However, he is very straightforward and also admits that there are aspects of your mathematical education that you might not specifically need anymore. But why should you still learn maths? Ellenberg argues that there is so much more to maths than just adding and subtracting numbers or doing fractions. Math classes improve your way of thinking about many aspects in your life - or at least, math classes should do that. This issue is still debated among math teachers. There are still the ones who prefer the traditional approach of having students practice doing fractions and solving yet another sometimes often slightly math-related problem until they finally discover an algorithm that they can use for a very limited range of problems 'normal' people don't have, anyway. And then there is the more modern approach to teach students the meaning behind what they are doing and to promote critical thinking before mindlessly applying algorithms to problems. This is not to say that students should not learn algorithms anymore. They still should, to my (and Ellenberg's) mind. However, this is just the foundation of what maths is all about. The following quotation sums up Ellenberg's view quite nicely and I couldn't agree more.
At the same time, Ellenberg admits that not everything can be solved with one hundred percent certainty, even though this is often expected of mathematicians. Sometimes, for example when asked to predict which presidential candidate is going to win a certain state, mathematicians can provide a probability, but not rule out uncertainty entirely. However:
The book also touches upon a topic many of us discuss around here. Are pop fiction and classic literature - literature with a capital 'L', if you may - mutually exclusive? Or framed differently: Is reading pop fiction a waste of time, and is classic literature always worth the time and effort you put in reading? Ellenberg compares this to the phenomenon of how the guys (or women, for that matter) you meet are either handsome and mean or nice and ugly, but never nice and handsome. He says that we do not even look at the mean and ugly ones so they are ruled out anyway. The triangle of acceptable men, then, which he defines as either nice or handsome is naturally only a small portion of all the men you can meet. And the nice and handsome men are an even smaller part of all the men available. Therefore, the chance of meeting a nice and handsome man has to be quite small logically. If you substitute the two axes from 'ugly' to 'handsome' and 'mean' to 'nice' with 'bad' to 'good' and 'classic' to 'popular', you end up with a similar situation for literary works. If you want to look up the whole reasoning, either read the book or look up Berkson's fallacy. Here goes Ellenberg and his answer seems quite intelligent to me:
To sum up, I enjoyed reading How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking a lot, not only because I agree with what Ellenberg writes to a large extent. No matter if you are interested in mathematics or not, you will probably find this book quite interesting and will probably (not certainly, of course!) not be sorry about picking it up. 4 stars. show less
Anticipating readers' feeling towards mathematics, Jordan Ellenberg attempts to answer the most-asked question in math classes first: "So, when am I going to use this?" Ellenberg encourages people to look deeper into things and discover the math in our everyday lives. However, he is very straightforward and also admits that there are aspects of your mathematical education that you might not specifically need anymore. But why should you still learn maths? Ellenberg argues that there is so much more to maths than just adding and subtracting numbers or doing fractions. Math classes improve your way of thinking about many aspects in your life - or at least, math classes should do that. This issue is still debated among math teachers. There are still the ones who prefer the traditional approach of having students practice doing fractions and solving yet another sometimes often slightly math-related problem until they finally discover an algorithm that they can use for a very limited range of problems 'normal' people don't have, anyway. And then there is the more modern approach to teach students the meaning behind what they are doing and to promote critical thinking before mindlessly applying algorithms to problems. This is not to say that students should not learn algorithms anymore. They still should, to my (and Ellenberg's) mind. However, this is just the foundation of what maths is all about. The following quotation sums up Ellenberg's view quite nicely and I couldn't agree more.
"Working an integral or performing linear regression is something that a computer can do quite effectively. Understanding whether the result makes sense - or deciding whether the method is the right one to use in the first place - requires a guiding human hand. When we teach mathematics we are supposed to be explaning how to be that guide. A math course that fails to do so is essentially training the student to be a very slow, buggy version of Microsoft Excel. And let's be frank: that really is what many of our math courses are doing."
At the same time, Ellenberg admits that not everything can be solved with one hundred percent certainty, even though this is often expected of mathematicians. Sometimes, for example when asked to predict which presidential candidate is going to win a certain state, mathematicians can provide a probability, but not rule out uncertainty entirely. However:
"Math gives us a way of being unsure in a principled way: not just throwing up our hands and saying 'huh,' but rather making a firm assertion: 'I'm not sure, and this is roughly how not-sure I am.' Or even more: 'I'm unsure, and you should be too.'"
The book also touches upon a topic many of us discuss around here. Are pop fiction and classic literature - literature with a capital 'L', if you may - mutually exclusive? Or framed differently: Is reading pop fiction a waste of time, and is classic literature always worth the time and effort you put in reading? Ellenberg compares this to the phenomenon of how the guys (or women, for that matter) you meet are either handsome and mean or nice and ugly, but never nice and handsome. He says that we do not even look at the mean and ugly ones so they are ruled out anyway. The triangle of acceptable men, then, which he defines as either nice or handsome is naturally only a small portion of all the men you can meet. And the nice and handsome men are an even smaller part of all the men available. Therefore, the chance of meeting a nice and handsome man has to be quite small logically. If you substitute the two axes from 'ugly' to 'handsome' and 'mean' to 'nice' with 'bad' to 'good' and 'classic' to 'popular', you end up with a similar situation for literary works. If you want to look up the whole reasoning, either read the book or look up Berkson's fallacy. Here goes Ellenberg and his answer seems quite intelligent to me:
"Literary snobbery works the same way. You know how popular novels are terrible? It's because the masses don't appreciate quality. It's because the Great Sphere of Novels, and the only novels you ever hear about are the ones in the Acceptable Triangle, which are either popular or good."
To sum up, I enjoyed reading How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking a lot, not only because I agree with what Ellenberg writes to a large extent. No matter if you are interested in mathematics or not, you will probably find this book quite interesting and will probably (not certainly, of course!) not be sorry about picking it up. 4 stars. show less
Если вы, как и гипотетическая студентка в начале этой книги, иногда задаетесь вопросом «Зачем нужно учить все эти логарифмы и интегралы, неужели все это в жизни потребуется?», то вам стоит ее прочесть. Потому что автор показывает, где и как математика, а вернее, умение show more рассуждать математически, приходит на помощь в реальном мире обывателя. Впрочем, добавляет он, наиболее востребованных во взрослой жизни разделов в школе как раз и не преподают (да и в большинстве вузов лишь мимоходом): речь о теории вероятности и статистике. Что прискорбно, ибо и СМИ, и политики любят бомбардировать людей статистикой и прогнозами, которые трудно воспринимать критически. Однако теперь книга Элленберга, написанная с хорошим юмором (да, математикам он совсем не чужд) и парадоксальными на первый взгляд примерами из окружающей действительности, позволит не только лучше разбираться в происходящем, но и даст немало возможностей продемонстрировать приятелям в баре, какие они, в сущности, двоечники. show less
Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else by Jordan Ellenberg
Ellenberg’s paean to geometry. Sadly, I didn’t like it as much as his first popular book; he tells you that eigenvalues can do important things, but doesn’t quite explain what they are. Still, it’s amusingly written: “If you’re finding it hard to imagine what a fourteen-dimensional landscape looks like, I recommend following the advice of Geoffrey Hinton, one of the founders of the modern theory of neural nets: ‘Visualize a 3-space and say “fourteen” to yourself very show more loudly. Everyone does it.’” Ellenberg loves geometry because it offers real answers—not necessarily important ones, but indisputable ones. Geometry can also offer insights for things like gerrymandering; he excoriates the Supreme Court’s willful misunderstanding of what anti-gerrymandering advocates seek (not equal representation—that would actually be weird—but representation that doesn’t reflect extreme partisan bias in drawing boundaries). As he explains about states like Wisconsin, “where Republicans get a majority of the statewide vote, the gerrymander doesn’t have much effect; those are elections where the GOP would get an assembly majority anyway. It’s only in Democratic-leaning environments that the gerrymander really kicks in, acting as a firewall.” show less
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