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June 5, 2010
Innumeracy
After reading an article by John Allen Paulos taking BP to task of their inability (or unwillingness) to do middle-school geometry, I put Innumeracy in my library hold queue.
It arrived the other day, and weighing in at only a hundred and eighty pages, it was a pretty quick read.
While I completely agree with the cover quote, from Douglas Hofstadter that "Our society would be unimaginably different if the average person truly understood the ideas in this marvelous and important little book" I can't say that the existence of the book had any real chance to change society, given it's tendency toward innumeracy.
If you've taken probability and statistics, or discrete mathematics, you've almost certainly been exposed to the ideas in the book. And you've almost equally certainly failed - as most of us do - to correctly apply those lessons to day-to-day life.
Worth reading, but difficult to proselytize.
Posted by dberger at June 5, 2010 1:41 PM