The Math of Life and Death

Ok first off, my copy is titled ‘The Maths of Life and Death', now technically as an Australian who speaks the kings English I should be pronouncing it ‘maths' but you know what? ‘Math' sounds better and also makes more sense etymologically, so I'm going to defensively stick to math.

Now to the book, it's a series of standalone articles about how math (and numbers more broadly) influences real world events. This is anything from evidence in court, algorithms optimising your feed, news agents reporting “facts”, and a whole heap more.

Each article includes a fairly easy to read explanation of the different number principles being discussing (whether it's statistics, probabilities, or even the concept of numbers themselves), so it's a nice primer to understand the concepts and see how it applies to reality. Plus because it's articles, it's very easy to put down and pick up again when the mood strikes for some more math.

Good grief, an alternate title could very well be “2020: all the ways the world will quantitatively fall apart.”

No Formulas. Just Numb3rs. In this book about how math shapes our lives, British math professor Yates doesn't take us into the algebra, geometry, and even trigonometry that we all use daily - whether we realize it or not. Instead, he takes an approach similar to the now decade old US television show Numb3rs, starring David Krumholtz and Rob Morrow, wherein he shows applications of higher level mathematics in fields such as epidemiology, medicine, law, journalism, elections, and several others. Yates cites real world examples including unjust convictions and Ebola outbreaks and many others to show how math was used incorrectly and what the math actually showed in that situation, to help the reader begin to get an overall sense of math without getting bogged down in the technical calculations. Truly an excellent book for even the more arithmophobic among us, as it shows the numbers all around us and explains how we can have a better sense of them.

Disclaimers: 1) I LOVED Numb3rs back in the day and would still be watching it if it were still on the air. 2) I have a computer science degree and very nearly got secondary mathematics education and mathematics bachelors degrees at the same time as my CS one - so obviously I'm a bit more attuned to math than others.