John Allen Paulos - A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper

[A] witty crusade against mathematical illiteracy.... Mr. Pauloss little essay explaining the Banzhaf power index and how it relates to Lani Guiniers ideas about empowering minorities is itself worth the price of the book.... A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper is at bottom a plea for rationality and a repudiation of the illogic and obscurantism that, paradoxically, plague one of historys best-educated countries.New York Times

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 didnt seem quite rightthat had the faint odor of illogic hovering about ityou could just lean out the window and shout, Jack! Get the hell over here!... [This is] a fun, spunky, wise little book that would be helpful to both the consumers of the news and its purveyors.Washington Post

This book is not about mathematics, and its not really about newspapers. It should be called, A Clear Thinker Explains the World.... This is a wise and thoughtful book, which skewers much of what everyone knows to be true.Los Angeles Times

A truly thought-provoking book.USA Today

A wide-ranging collection of musings on mathematics, the media and life itself.Chicago Tribune

Paulos wit and humoradmirably displayed in Innumeracyare in top form. His irreverent and pointed comments entertain as well as educate. Though Paulos writes about a bewildering number of topics, he has something fresh and interesting to say about each.Philadelphia Inquirer

A strength of the book is Pauloss self-effacing sense of humor and awareness of the professional myopia among mathematicians.... This book will help the reader to follow Pauloss advice to Always be smart, seldom be certain.Christian Science Monitor

Should be mandatory reading for every journalistas well as the readers, viewers and former tutors they supposedly serve.New Scientist

Irresistible.Scientific American

If paranoia could be cured by math, Paulos would be the Jonas Salk of the disease. His dissection of conspiracy theories is delicious.Molly Ivins

This is a broad canvas and Paulos uses broad, bold strokesjumping from baseball salaries to employment equity to the Gulf War to coin-flipping and stock market forecasters. The writing, however, is always clear; the computational demands modest; the rewards potentially great.Ottawa Citizen

[Paulos is] a likable academic with an infectious enthusiasm for his subject.Gina Kolata, American Mathematical Society

There can be no doubt that Paulos writes beautifully, that he loves mathematical ideas, and that he discusses such ideas with zest.Technology Review

Because of Pauloss quiet good sense and wide-ranging mind, his book... is simply nifty, larded with clever and informative tidbits as he strolls his broad, discursive way through typical newspaper reporting.Reason

This book will bring a great deal of pleasure to manyas it did to the reviewer. It is full of fun, full of information, full of insights.American Mathematical Monthly

A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper does as much as one brief book can do to highlight the problem of innumeracy while simultaneously contributing to its solution.... Paulos book does a valuable public service and should be required reading for all.Capital Times

Copyright 1995 by John Allen Paulos

Preface to the 2013 Paperback Edition Copyright 2013 by John Allen Paulos

Paperback published in 2013 by Basic Books,

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

Hardcover first published in 1995 by Basic Books

Paperback first published in 1996 by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 250 West 57th Street, 15th Floor, New York, NY 10107.

Books published by Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail .

The Library of Congress has cataloged the first paperback edition as follows:

Paulos, John Allen.

A mathematician reads the newspaper / John Allen Paulos.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p.2056) and index.

1. MathematicsPopular works. I. Title.

QA93.P385 1996

510dc2095-46049

CIP

ISBN 978-0-465-05067-3 (e-book)

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To storytelling number-crunchers and number-crunching storytellers

O bviously much has changed since I first wrote A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper. Nevertheless, the same solecisms, both mathematical and otherwise, continue to appear not only in newspapers but also on TV, in blogs, and on social media. Ive often thought that pointing them out and detoxifying them is somewhat akin to picking up the trash, which must be done continuously or it piles up and begins to smell. Most of the issues discussed in the bookelections, medical tests, coincidences, crime, risk assessment, sports records, philosophical and psychological conundrums, and many othersare subject to solecisms that, indeed, have piled up. Happily, there are more mathematical trash collectors in 2013 than there were when this book first appeared.

A few of the analyses of news stories in A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper were minor and maybe a bit picayune, but I hope they provided more insight than one of my favorite tales about statisticians. Three of them went duck hunting. The first took a shot at a duck and the bullet sailed six inches over it; the second then took a shot that landed six inches in front of the duck. At this the third statistician jumped up and down excitedly, exclaiming, We got it, we got it.

Unlike the account of the duck and the statisticians, the stories in this book did benefit from mathematical analysis and many of them had significant policy implications. Let me describe two examples that came along after the book was published and which I first discussed in my Whos Counting column for ABCnews.com . I choose them because they involve the ber-serious issues of war and the environment. The first is relevant to the military strategy that the United States followed during the Iraq War, which, like the war itself, made no sense, and the second deals with the 2010 British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Both suggest that journalists of all sorts, not just science journalists, should pay more attention to the mathematical issues that lurk in front-page news stories. Sometimes the reward is just a quirky insight, but often the mathematics casts an undermining light on the whole story.

The mathematics involved neednt be esoteric. Squaring the number three, for example, results in nine, and this simple arithmetical operation says something about military strategy in general and the Iraq War in particular. How so?