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A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper by John…
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A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper (original 1995; edition 1997)

by John Allen Paulos

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1,0122120,280 (3.58)23
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.… (more)
Member:annabnyc
Title:A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper
Authors:John Allen Paulos
Info:Anchor (1997), Paperback, 224 pages
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A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper by John Allen Paulos (1995)

  1. 01
    Gödel, Escher, Bach : An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter (heidialice)
    heidialice: GEB is a thousand times as intense, but if you enjoyed the parts about self-referentiality it's worth a skim. Conversely, if GEB is just too much, Paulos' concise introduction to the theme is very accessible.
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» See also 23 mentions

English (19)  Spanish (1)  Italian (1)  All languages (21)
Showing 1-5 of 19 (next | show all)
7/7/22
  laplantelibrary | Jul 7, 2022 |
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, Sports, Obituaries

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". It seems like the Bahnzhof power index was invented by Bahnzhof in order to prove that some of the counties or districts in Orange County, NY had no voting power. I wonder if that index is still used in legal suits to demonstrate that a voting system is somehow unfair. There was such a suit in Lowell, MA recently, which caused some adjustment to the voting system for city council members.

So, after reading a single essay and thinking about it a bit, and scanning a few more, I decided that this was the kind of book that should be returned to the library now, and maybe checked out again some other time, and that's what I did.
  themulhern | Dec 14, 2019 |
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: 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.
( )
1 vote setnahkt | Dec 2, 2017 |
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 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. ( )
  Razinha | May 23, 2017 |
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 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." ( )
  keylawk | Jan 8, 2016 |
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I read the news today, Oh Boy. -- John Lennon
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To storytelling number-crunchers and number-crunching storytellers.
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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.

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Penguin Australia

An edition of this book was published by Penguin Australia.

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