The Math of Life and Death
7 Mathematical Principles That Shape Our Lives
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- USD 13.99
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- USD 13.99
Publisher Description
Brilliant and entertaining mathematician Kit Yates illuminates seven mathematical concepts that shape our daily lives.
From birthdays to birth rates to how we perceive the passing of time, mathematical patterns shape our lives. But for those of us who left math behind in high school, the numbers and figures we encounter as we go about our days can leave us scratching our heads, feeling as if we’re fumbling through a mathematical minefield. In this eye-opening and “welcome addition to the math-for-people-who-hate-math” (Kirkus Reviews), Kit Yates illuminates hidden principles that can help us understand and navigate the chaotic and often opaque surfaces of our world.
In The Math of Life and Death, Yates takes us on a “dizzying, dazzling” (Nature) tour of everyday situations and grand-scale applications of mathematical concepts, including exponential growth and decay, optimization, statistics and probability, and number systems. Along the way he reveals the mathematical undersides of controversies over DNA testing, Ponzi schemes, viral marketing, and historical events such as the Chernobyl disaster and the Amanda Knox trial. Readers will finish this book with an enlightened perspective on the news, the law, medicine, and history, and will be better equipped to make personal decisions and solve problems with math in mind, whether it’s choosing the shortest checkout line at the grocery store or halting the spread of a deadly disease.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ponzi schemes, nuclear fission, and viral marketing are just a few of the topics covered in this savvy book from first-time author Yates, a senior mathematics lecturer at the University of Bath. Exposing the "shaky mathematics" behind the Body Mass Index and health-related diagnostic tools, Yates also offers skepticism of home DNA testing kits and the risk calculations offered by genome-testing companies. Yates considers how calculation errors and "pseudomathematical arguments" have led to wrongful convictions, including of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, condemned to life imprisonment in 1894 after an expert witness's "abstruse mathematical analysis" linked him to a handwritten message offering French military secrets to the Germans. (Over a decade later, the famous mathematician Henri Poincar pointed out a basic problem with the witness's math, and Dreyfus was exonerated.) With fervor, Yates exposes the misuse of statistics and use of "mathematical misdirections" in patient-advice publications and scientific literature. Readers with backgrounds in math should particularly enjoy the heavier chapters, covering topics such as optimization and the seven Millennium Prize Problems, "considered to be the most important unresolved problems in mathematics." However, any inquisitive and open-minded reader can enjoy this valuable primer on the use and abuse of numbers in the everyday world.)
