Add BookmarkA Mathematician Reads the Newspaper
With the same user-friendly, quirky, and perceptive approach that made Innumeracy a bestseller, John Allen Paulos travels though the pages of the daily newspaper showing how math and numbers are a key element in many of the articles we read every day. From the Senate, SATs, and sex, to crime, celebrities, and cults, he takes stories that may not seem to involve mathematics at all and demonstrates how a lack of mathematical knowledge can hinder our understanding of them.
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Paulos is a witty mathematician and makes excellent points in his analyses of newspapers focusing on the numbers, statistics, ignorance and misrepresentations. Arranged as newspaper content, with politics and current topics first, followed by local news, lifestyles, science, and sports, he writes short "articles" with composite made up headlines to draw you in; not any different than any newspaper. Published in 1995, the topics and references are dated, but the message is not.
I w... (show more)
Paulos is a witty mathematician and makes excellent points in his analyses of newspapers focusing on the numbers, statistics, ignorance and misrepresentations. Arranged as newspaper content, with politics and current topics first, followed by local news, lifestyles, science, and sports, he writes short "articles" with composite made up headlines to draw you in; not any different than any newspaper. Published in 1995, the topics and references are dated, but the message is not.
I would be curious to ask him what he thinks of Internet news and the Fox News Network. He had faith then that a newspaper was of more value than a television newscast, but that pre-dated the tabloid TV of Murdoch's empire and the deceptive pseudo-statistics they use, so I'm sure he's even more convinced of his original premise. (show less)
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Books that try to combine mathematics and popular culture are always difficult, because every reader will want something different. Personally, I found the mathematics among this collection to be on the light side; some essays seemed as though they just happened to have been written by a mathematician. Still, Paulos' writing is clear and easy to read, and his brushes with philosophy will create interest if not epiphanies.
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