Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences
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Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences description
This is the book that made "innumeracy" a household word, at least in some households. Paulos admits that "at least part of the motivation for any book is anger, and this book is no exception. I'm distressed by a society which depends so completely on mathematics and science and yet seems to indifferent to the innumeracy and scientific illiteracy of so many of its citizens." But that is not all that drives him. The difference between our pretensions and reality is absurd and humorous, and the numerate can see this better than those who don't speak math. "I think there's something of the divine in these feelings of our absurdity, and they should be cherished, not avoided." Paulos is not entirely successful at balancing anger and absurdity, but he tries. His diatribes against astrology, bad math education, Freud, and willful ignorance are leavened with jokes, mathematical or the sort (he claims) favored by the numerate. It remains to be seen if Innumeracy will indeed be able, as Hofstadter hoped, to "help launch a revolution in math education that would do for innumeracy what Sabin and Salk did for polio"--but many of the improvements Paulos suggested have come to pass within 10 years. Only time will tell if the generation raised on these new principles is more resistant to innumeracy--and need only worry about being incomputable. --Mary Ellen Curtin |
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Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥ |
Good despite the self-referential inference to innumeracy
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An otherwise interesting, thoughtful book is marred by the phrase that seems obligatory in most popular mathematical books, "the occasional difficult passage can be ignored with impunity." As the title suggests, this book addresses the general public's inability to deal with numbers and their uses. To provide another excuse for avoiding "difficult" mathematics really tends to defeat the purpose of the book and could possibly be considered as a psychological "put down." Are these passages really important to the reader or are they in some manner more important to the author and merely serve to distract the reader? Most often, as is the case in this book, such passages have reasonably comprehensible explanations. Why not use the space to provide another paragraph of explanation?
With this initial hurdle addressed, it should be pointed out that Paulos does a very good job in presenting interesting examples of the use and misuse of numbers, many of which are used in our society, and to some extent are being used to shape it. For example, consider the fact that in general female workers earn approximately 59% the salary of males, which has been used as the argument for stiff equal pay legislation. This fact alone does not take into account the additional information that a greater percentage of women work part-time and many have only recently entered the job market and so have yet to work their way up the hierarchical job ladder. Many other examples deal with the continued popularity of pseudoscience, despite the alternative "reality" that all the "evidence" for it can easily be explained by random variations in the data.
Written in the author's relaxed style and sporting an occasional pun, this book should be read by anyone concerned with the general lack of mathematical sophistication among the general public. Unfortunately, the conditional probability that a person will read it, given that they are themselves innumerate, is no doubt quite low.
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