Rating: 
Summary: DANGER WILL ROBINSON, DANGER - ANGRY MATH TEACHER ABOUT!
Review: 'At least part of the motivation for any book is anger, and this book is no exception. I'm distressed by a society which depends so completely on mathematics and science and yet seems so indifferent to the innumeracy and scientific illiteracy of so many of its citizens...' (p.134). Writers generally put the motivation statement at the front of the book, but this occurs at the back. His anger does indeed fuel part of his need to write, and is one of the reasons why he succeeds but not fully. A moments reflection reveals that many books, of all types, are not motivated by anger at all. I am sure that in a calm moment he would appreciate the economy of the refutation 'NOT' appended to the first sentence of his statement. The question it raises is, can he justify his anger as righteous and thereby redeem it, like a mathematical cleansing of the temple? Or do we read the book with respect for his position and experience, but gingerly, lest we disturb a dog best left sleeping? I like this book for the human-ness of its strengths and weaknesses. Published in 1988, it is fresh and contemporary, of course the math can never date, but his applications and examples have not dated either. As an experienced and passionate teacher of mathematics the professor has some valuable insights into the art and science of maths teaching. 'Math anxiety' and the 'extreme intellectual lethargy which affects a small but growing number of students' all concern him, as they do me. (My own small experiences in this area as a tutor and in the classroom echo his. He might also add the 'trained ability to concentrate' as a fundament of doing math - and perhaps all intellection.) He badly wants us all to gain an instinctive sense of number and master its huge array of applications in sorting the wheat from the chaff in life's great information silo. The cheap, slap-happy and sensationalist reporting of the media, astrology, quackery, pseudoscience, and the jiggery-pokery-statistics of governments all come under his sharp scrutiny. His sense of humour, wit, and selection of amusing quotations leaven the text throughout. Some embedded gems: sections such as those on combinatorial co-efficients (how the lottery works), and binomial probability (how to test for ESP) are good, but they really are a little too brief, and use examples which are more difficult than need be. These repay careful re-reading and require expansion with one's own pencil and paper - which enforced exercise is not his intent in writing. As he himself notes, he has a weakness for being overly concise when writing, his symbolic math habits being so strong. As an author, he should try to avoid statements like 'this part can be ignored, as indeed can the whole book'...counsels of despair! And he also promises not to lecture us or patronise us in this book, as he is aware of the temptation to do so in this type of work: mostly he succeeds. For something lighter you could try 'Why Do Buses Come In Threes?' by Eastaway & Wyndham. For something a little more rigorous try 'How to Solve It' by Polya, or 'Reasoning with Statistics' by Williams & Monge'. Keith Devlin's 'The Maths Gene' is good for some psychology of math.
Rating: 
Summary: interesting, witty
Review: As a shamed mamber of the "innumerate" (as Paulos refers to us), I read his book with interest. His point - that the majority of us do not have "number sense" - is well taken. Many of the examples he disucsses as symptoms of innumeracy (not having a clear understanding of just how big big numbers are, making ridiculous statements regarding probability) I have seen and even made myself. Yet there is very little by way of addressing the problem - some of us "innumerates" got to be that way from bad experiences in school; others have an irrational fear of numbers, some just struggle with the abstractness of mathematics; in any case, it would have been helpful had some concrete solutions been presented. Nonetheless I found the book written with humor and wit - for a book about numbers, it was not dry, but rather fascinating. Too bad it seems that it reaches a rather narrow audience.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting applications
Review: Delighted by the latest Paulos' book (a mathematician plays the stock market) I was really interested in reading more of his books. This one is a non-technical introduction to the main concepts of probability and statistics. While the concepts themselves are not new for many people, the applications of these concepts are very interesting and entertaining. Paulos provides from a deconstruction of pseudoscience, to an optimal algorithm for finding your spouse...
Rating:
Summary: Good probability of you like this book.
Review: I always like it when I read something technical and don't have to have a PhD to understand what is being said. Paulos gets his point of 'innumeracy' across very well and by using some fairly easy math, shows that it isn't that bad. Well written and to the point, a good read for the average person to understand some basic probability. I did have some, I guess, issues with the book. I found that the actual consequences of an innumerate society were lacking. Yes people don't understand the stats thrown at them every day by media, gov't, even in their jobs, but what's the devastating effects of it. He does go into this somewhat but the emphasis of the book was on the math and not really the effects of lack of understanding. The other issue I had was that he keeps talking about stats. Yes this is a weak area in people today, but if people can't do the basics of adding and multipling, then they can't figure out the stats. Maybe his attack was too high? But all in all, a good book and recommended reading.
Rating: 
Summary: Too Much Exaggerated
Review: I could not believe that such an ordinary book got so much positive feedback..
first of all, the organization of the sections are meaningless, from probability to religions/parapsychology, the order is quite difficult to handle.. this shows me that even the writer could not understand what mathematics is... it is simplicity:)
before reading this book, just looking at the title, I thought if I have written this book what can be the order, and what should I include in such a book..
1st: I should include a section, why should human being needs to think.. I can give a simple example of: think that you are the only person on earth.. what should you do.. what you can think.. what you can imagine.. what questions bear in your mind.. etc. etc. this all come to the famous Descartes: "I think, therefore I am.". If you answer no to thinking question, then you are dead, not even equal to a flower (since it does what it should do)
2nd: what is the role of mathematics in our thinking? does it improve it? or is it a model to copy thinking?
3rd: what is the role of mathematics in daily life (50% covered in this book)
4th: Instead of discussing parapsychological claims, I should include the mostly done mistakes. I could not believe that the writer even challenged religions, although most of the world population believes in one. Thanks GOD that, the writer did not challenged the miracles of the prophets.
What I mean by mostly done mistakes? For instance, in Belgium, we decrease a premium (200 index vs. the other brands) products price by only 10%, and what we write a promotion on it. The sales go up by more than 50% (150+ index versus previous period).
Even the product performance is perfectly same as the the others. This is how we (american companies) capture money from the world, in industries as FMCG or cigarettes, (although Volkswagen suffers in huge automative industry). Some people should not think a lot, so that some countries gain the money.
This is the best example of "not thinking logically" and "television population".
As a sum, all the above things I have written maybe giving you more than this book can offer... Just go and find "Mechanism of the Mind" or some other book of Edward de Bono, you will benefit somewhat more...
Rating:
Summary: shallow water
Review: I found this book to be about as deep as morning mist. The authors points, supposedly illustrating "innumeracy" more illustrative of the authors lack of depth. Most children I know realize that the length of a calendar day does not change with the seasons. Yet the author chooses to spend far too many words agonizing about how "people" - the innumerati - believe that the day is shorter in winter because of the poetic use "the days grow shorter in winter". Clearly the days that grow shorter are the daylight hours. Most native speakers of english know this even when they use they use the phrase the author finds so objectionable. This use of day can also be found in the expression "the day" and is alluded to in "the night". In fact the author's pedantic rant is exactly as offensive to clear thinking as the astronomers objection to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. Again, clearly the dark side is the metaphorical dark side, the one we do not see. In ignoring this in both cases, the argument sets up a straw man to knock down. Only a very shallow mind finds solace knocking down straw men.
Rating:
Summary: Good look at Math in our world
Review: I read the sequel of this book before I read this book and enjoyed the sequel a little more than this one. But this is a pretty good look at how mathmetical topics are misunderstood and abused in our society. A worthwhile read for everyone and our society would be better off if everyone spent a little understanding the concepts in this book.
Rating:
Summary: Misses the Mark by a Fair Margin
Review: In reading this book I got the sense that the author wanted to show us just how smart he is. At times I felt that the text overflowed with intellectual elitism ad nauseum, and while it contained lots of examples, it offered very little in the way of (numerical) enlightenment.
Two notes of caution are in order when reading this book. First, Innumeracy is perhaps the first of several books on the subject of mathematics and numerical befuddlement among the general population written by Mr. Paulos, and he tends to recycle much of his material from book to book. So, if you have read this little book, you have pretty much read most of his other books. Second, most of the examples in Innumeracy do not qualify as truly original content, and some readers may have run into most of them in other math texts in high school and college.
While it is true that numbers and statistics require interpretation, the author should also bear in mind that both have a context, and when viewed outside of their proper context, any number of questionable and downright false interpretations can result. It is really no difficult matter to compute, manipulate or convert numbers, but gaining insight from these treatments is the real challenge. This requires critical thinking
That said, in the first chapter, the author plays a bit with measurements, and shows that we can for example calculate the length of our arms in miles if it suits us. However, I must ask if it is appropriate to calculate my arm length in miles when inches work just fine. Just because we can do something does not necessarily imply that we should do it, or that it is even appropriate, and I do not think that the author learned that particular lesson (which incidentally is a lesson many scientists never seem to learn).
The second chapter delves into chance, coincidence and probability in everyday life. He muses on how coincidence is often mistaken for fate (or worse, divine intervention), and how we try to derive profound meaning from events due to pure chance. The chapter is a fair, witty, but somewhat dry take on a typically mundane topic.
The third chapter on pseudoscience is probably the best part of the book. Here, he skewers all manner of foolishness, from astrology and numerology to quack cures and fringe science with good humor. Moreover, his peculiar mathematically oriented humor would find its most appropriate home here.
By the fourth chapter, the real problems of the text begin to show themselves in earnest. First, Mr. Paulos doesn't bother to give references for certain `facts'. Second, he tends to make claims and then offer no support for them. Third, and this is probably the most damaging of all, he references the work of Tversky and Kahneman (the founders of Prospect Theory and later Nobelists for their contribution to economic science), but does not seem to be aware of the fact that most of their studies suffered from a lack of what statisticians used to call external validity. That is to say, the conclusions made from the study, while being for the most part reliable and truthful for the participants (internal validity), are not necessarily true for the greater population at large which you may want to make conclusions about.
Although the fifth chapter, titled `Statistics, Trade-offs and Society' starts off with the right idea in mind, it finally falls flat when he reaches statistical significance and Type I and II errors. People who read about the latter for the first time may come away either confused, which is bad, or thinking that they know something when they really do not, which is even worse. As this chapter is most likely the most relevant to the vast majority of lay readers, given that it deals with both statistics in the news and everyday life and some of the mass public's favorite bogeymen- cancer, heart disease and what not, a lack of references for further enlightenment demonstrates yet another glaring weakness in this text.
Finally, in the last chapter, we are treated to a fairly decent serving of thoughtful and intelligent prose of such great clarity and candor that I for one was amazed that a nutty math professor could produce. How unfortunate it was that such fleeting moments of clarity and beauty were so infrequent in this text, and having read three other books by Paulos, I can say with force that he has failed to build upon such an outstanding snippet of quality writing.
In sum, you may be able to improve your SAT or GRE score with this book, but not much else.
Rating: 
Summary: Not an error!
Review: In response to a previous reader's "glaring error," I note that there is a condition in Paulos's statement of the "two children problem" which makes Paulos's answer of 2/3 correct. The problem is a well-known one and very sensitive to phrasing.
Rating:
Summary: GOOD ANALYSIS, GREAT ANECDOTES ABOUT THE VALUE OF NUMERACY
Review: In this short book, Paulos does an outstanding job of pointing out what lack of number intimacy can do to a person. The anecdotes are outstanding, especially the ones on large numbers and on probability. For example, he shows how one is fooled by probability: If we have 23 people in a room, what is the probability that two of them have the same birthday? 50%!! Very conterintuitive. The author also tries to understand why it is almost considered acceptable for a person to admit that one is "bad with numbers", while it not being ok to be "bad with words". The realm of psychology is not his forte, but the ideas he points to are interesting. Overall, this is an easy to read book, much easier even to one literate with numbers. I was done with it in 3 hours, and was left wanting more, so much so that I am now buying some more of his works. If they are half as good as Innumeracy, then they will be good enough.
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