John Allen Paulos - Synopses of Innumeracy, Math and Humor, and His Other Books
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All books available at bookstores and online through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, 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."

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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