The recap
Jordan Ellenberg wants to persuade you that mathematics is not a heap of formulas but a way of seeing, an extension of common sense that keeps you from fooling yourself. He opens with a wartime puzzle: where should armour go on bombers that return riddled with bullet holes, and why does the answer lie with the planes that never came back? From there he ranges across straight-line thinking and why more is not always better, regression to the mean, lotteries and expected value, the slippery logic of statistical significance, and the curious mathematics of elections. Each idea arrives inside a story, often a funny one, and the equations stay mostly offstage. Ellenberg, a research mathematician who has also published a novel, is generous with readers who believe they are bad at maths, and he is as quick to show where numbers mislead as where they illuminate. Readers finish better equipped to question headlines, polls and studies, and convinced that clear, careful thinking is a skill anyone can learn.
Why read it
For anyone who was told they were not a maths person, and for news junkies who want a sharper eye for dodgy statistics and confident nonsense.
Fun facts
- 01
The book opens with the statistician Abraham Wald, who reasoned during the Second World War that armour belonged where returning planes showed no bullet holes, a classic case of survivorship bias.
- 02
In the UK it carries a different subtitle, The Hidden Maths of Everyday Life, and its publisher bills it as a Sunday Times bestseller.
- 03
As a teenager Ellenberg won gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1987 and 1989, both with perfect scores.
- 04
Before this book he published a novel, The Grasshopper King, in 2003.
