John Allen Paulos - Synopses of Innumeracy, Math and Humor,
and His Other Books
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All books available at bookstores
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or Booksense.
Synopses of Paulos' Books
IRRELIGION: A Mathematician Explains Why
The Arguments For God Just Don't Add Up
Publishers Weekly: "Few of the recent books on atheism have been worth reading just for wit and
style, but this is one of them: Paulos is truly funny"
Kirkus Reviews: "Reasoned, cool and concise - a good-natured primer for infidels."
Sam Harris: "John Allen Paulos has done us all a great service. Irreligion is an
elegant and timely response to the manifold ignorance that still goes by
the name of 'faith' in the 21st century."
Toronto Star: "Paulos's latest offering is a slim but explosive volume whose title is self-explanatory."
"[Paulos] is as sure-footed as a tiger as he prowls through the theocratic landscape, pouncing on sloppy thinking. To a large extent he succeeds in demolishing the arguments of believers." Phillip Manning, The News & Observer (Raleigh)
"Irreligion will, I'm confident, take a distinguished place in what one might call the canonical literature of the New Atheism." Norman Levitt, eSkeptic
"Paulos deserves high praise for turning out a book that is brief, forthright, and amiable. While making the same basic points as, say, Dawkins's The God Delusion, it avoids the often choleric tone of that work, keeping a light, conversational tone where Dawkins hurls flaming rhetorical fireballs of denunciation. This is not meant as a criticism of Dawkins, whose grim disgust with the cruel
absurdities of religion echoes what many of us feel in our hearts. But it does point up the fact that an atheist world-view does not necessarily lead to a foul-tempered misanthropy that is forever giving voice to searing disdain for a species that is so nasty and foolish as to delude itself into religious fervor.
Paulos.s cheery offhandedness, which never declines into mere diffidence, clearly makes the point that to be an atheist, one does not need to be a professional malcontent." Norman Levitt, eSkeptic
INNUMERACY - MATHEMATICAL ILLITERACY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
,
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (Hill and Wang division), 1989. Vintage paper,
1990. French, Italian, German, British, Japanese, Spanish, Korean,
Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Dutch, Finnish, and Swedish translations, 1990-1997.
New Farrar-Straus edition, 2001.
-- INNUMERACY is an examination of some of the consequences in
everyday life of mathematical illiteracy. These consequences -
confused personal decisions, muddled governmental policies, even an
increased susceptibility to pseudoscience - are not as visible as
are those of illiteracy or general cultural ignorance. Unlike the
latter failings, however, innumeracy often afflicts intelligent,
well-educated people, the kind of people who can understand the
most complicated of legal discussions, the most nuanced of
emotional interchanges, but whose eyes glaze over at the mere
mention of a number or a probability. Topics addressed include
stock scams, parapsychological claims, medical testing, insurance
frauds, sports records, sex discrimination, coincidences and chance
encounters.
"To combat [innumeracy] John Allen Paulos has concocted the perfect vaccine:
this book, which is in many ways better than an entire high school math
eductation! Our society would be unimaginably different if the average
person truly
understood the ideas in this marvelous and important book.
It is probably hopelessly optimistic to dream this way, but I hope that
Innumeracy might help launch a revolution in math education that would do
for innumeracy what Sabin and Salk did for polio." -- Douglas
Hofstadter, author of Godel, Escher, and Bach
A MATHEMATICIAN PLAYS THE STOCK MARKET, Basic Books, 2003 - Wending its way through the A Mathematician Plays the Market is the story of my disastrous love affair with WorldCom, but lest you dread a cloyingly personal account of how I lost my shirt (or at least had my sleeves shortened), I assure you that the book's primary purpose is to lay out, elucidate, and explore the basic conceptual mathematics of the market. I'll examine - largely via vignettes and stories rather than formulas and equations - various approaches to investing as well as a number of problems, paradoxes, and puzzles, some old, some new, that encapsulate issues associated with the market. Is it efficient? random? Is there anything to technical analysis, fundamental analysis, and other supposedly time-tested methods of picking stocks? How can one quantify risk? What is the role of cognitive illusion and pyschological foible (to which, alas, I am not immune)? What are the most common scams? What are options, portfolio theory, short-selling, the efficient market hypothesis? Does the normal bell-shaped curve really explain the market's occasionally extreme volatility? What about fractals, chaos, and other non-standard tools? In short, what can the tools of mathematics can tell us about the vagaries of the stock market?
"The world's wittiest mathematician has done it again! Paulos' hilarious account of getting trampled while running with the bulls will leave you laughing-and more than a little wiser."-- Sylvia Nasar, Knight Professor of
Business Journalism at Columbia University and author of A Beautiful Mind
BEYOND NUMERACY - RUMINATIONS OF A NUMBERS MAN, Knopf,
1991. Vintage paper, 1992. Italian, German, Dutch, British, Japanese
translations, 1992-1993.
-- BEYOND NUMERACY is in part a dictionary, in part a collection
of short mathematical essays, and in part the ruminations of a
numbers man. Its three to five page entries range from summaries of
whole disciplines (calculus, trigonometry, topology) to
biographical and historical asides (Godel, Pythagoras, non-
Euclidean geometry) to bits of mathematical or quasi-mathematical
folklore (infinite sets, Platonic solids, Q.E.D.) well-known to
mathematicians but not to the educated layman and laywoman.
Occasionally, I include less conventional pieces - a review of a
non-existent book, a stream-of-mathematical-consciousness car trip,
brief discussions of humor or ethics. New areas are discussed
(chaos and fractals, recursion, complexity) as well as more
classical ones (conic sections, mathematical induction, prime
numbers.
"His brief essays are arranged alphabetically by topic, and as with
one of its precursors, Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary, it makes
for an often jolly little book. ... The lore has it that when
Pythagoras discovered his great theorem on right triangles, he was so
transported that he sacrificed 100 head of oxen to the gods as a
token of gratitude. On this scale, Mr. Paulos's book is surely worth
an ox or two." -- Jim Holt, Wall Street Journal
A MATHEMATICIAN READS THE NEWSPAPER, Basic Books, 1995.
German, Dutch, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, 1996.
Doubleday paper, 1996.
-- The book, structured like the
morning paper, investigates the mathematical angles of stories in
the news and offers novel perspectives, questions, and ideas to
coffee-drinkers, strap-hangers, policy-makers, gossip-mongers,
bargain-hunters, trend-setters, and others who can't get along
without their daily paper. Mathematical naivete can put such
readers at a disadvantage in thinking about many issues in the news
that may seem on the surface not to involve mathematics at
all. "Number stories" complement, deepen, and regularly undermine
"people stories." The notions of probability and randomness can
enhance articles on crime, health risks, or other societal
obsessions. Logic and self-reference may help to clarify the
hazards of celebrity and spin-doctoring. Business finance, the
multiplication principle, and simple arithmetic point up consumer
fallacies, electoral tricks, and sports myths.
Chaos and non-linear dynamics suggest how difficult and frequently
worthless economic and environmental prediction is. And
mathematically pertinent notions from philosophy and psychology
provide perspective on a variety of public issues. These ideas
provide a revealing, albeit oblique slant on the traditional Who,
What, Where, When, Why, and How of the journalist's craft.
A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper is on
the readers' list of the Random House Modern Library's compilation
of the 100 best nonfiction books of the century.
"It would be great to have John Allen Paulos living next door. Every
morning when you read the paper and came across some story that didn't
seem quite right - that had the faint odor of illogic hovering about it -
you could just lean out the window and shout, "Jack! Get the hell over
here!"..... Paulos ... has now written a fun, spunky, wise little book
that would be helpful to both the consumers of the news and its
purveyors." -- Joel Achenbach, Washington Post
ONCE UPON A NUMBER, 1998. Basic Books. Chosen one
of the best nonfiction books of 1998 by The Los Angeles Times.
Spanish, German, Dutch, and UK
Penguin editions, 1999.
-- Like at least 62.212% of us, I've sometimes felt torn between
stories and statistics and their very different logics and mindsets.
I've always been struck, for example, by how
frequently people feel that they've been wronged or aggrieved and
how infrequently they feel that they've wronged or aggrieved
someone else. How could we all be so Lake Wobegone above average?
This and other such observations led me to thinking not only about the
differences between
stories and statistics but also about those between
subjective viewpoint and objective probability, between informal
discourse and logic, between meaning and information. The
book that resulted, this book, is a sort of mathematician's take on
C.P. Snow's two cultures, the literary and the scientific,
and is my attempt to bridge, or at least illuminate, the gap
between them. The stress is on examples, vignettes, parables,
stories, puzzles, and a few memoiristic segments. Topics include
the Bible codes, the statistics of racism and stereotyping, twenty
questions and "magical realism," the probability of Murphy's Law,
the role of common knowledge in the stock market, information
theory and literary criticism, and much more.
"Paulos' goal is nothing less than lofty. He hopes to reconcile the
personal aspect of human life, which refers to the stories we tell and
live by, and the impersonal, which is essentially mathematical, statistical
and scientific. ... Both delightful and wise, this little book cries out
to be kept close at hand, to be looked into from time to time, to be
treasured as an old friend." -- Anthony Day, Los Angeles Times.
MATHEMATICS AND HUMOR, University of Chicago Press, 1980.
Paper, 1982. Japanese translation, 1983, Dutch translation, 1990.
-- In MATHEMATICS AND HUMOR I i} explore the operations and
structures common to humor and the formal sciences (logic,
mathematics, and linguistics), ii) show how various notions from
these sciences provide formal analogues for different sorts of
jokes and joke schema, and iii) develop a mathematical model of
jokes (joke schema) using ideas from "catastrophe theory". In
accomplishing this I discuss self-reference, recursivity, axioms,
logical levels, non-standard models, transformational grammar, and
several "mathematical" (in an extended sense) ideas. Relevant
psychological and philosophical matters are discussed and provide
a matrix for both the technical development and for the jokes.
There is no comparable study of the formal properties of
humor.
"Many scholars nowadays write seriously about the ludicrous. Some merely
manage to be dull. A few - like Paulos - are brilliant in an odd endeavor."
--Harvey Mindess, Los Angeles Times
I THINK, THEREFORE I LAUGH, Columbia University Press,
1985. Paper, 1986. Spanish and French translations, 1987. Dutch
translation, 1990.
-- I THINK, THERFORE I LAUGH is intended to be, at least in
part, an exemplification of a remark by Wittgenstein that a good
and serious work in philosophy could be written which consisted
entirely of jokes. If one understands the relevant philosophical
point, one gets the joke (parable, story, puzzle). Humor and
analytic philosophy resonate at even deeper levels (both evince a
strong penchant for debunking, for example). I support this claim
with the above-mentioned stories and jokes, some exposition on
topics ranging from scientific induction to the distinction between
intentional and causal explanations, and the construction of
imaginary dialogues between Bertrand Russell and Groucho Marx,
Ludwig Wittgenstein and Lewis Carroll.
"Paulos is brilliant at capturing difficult ideas in a memorable joke. I've
never laughed so much while thinking so hard."--Brian Butterworth, author of
What Counts: How Every Brain Is Hardwired for Math.
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