Once Upon a Number : The Hidden Mathematical Logic of Stories

Rating:
Summary: Paulos is a better mathematician than he is a writer.
Review: I found some of Paulos' examples and insights useful, but whoever edited this book should have tried a bit harder. A careful writer or editor wouldn't use "insure" when "ensure" is the appropriate word. That's just one usage error among several that caught my attention.

Paulos seemingly wrote the book to voice his rambling thoughts, not to educate (or even entertain!) a reader. He's quite verbose and could have done everyone a favor by cutting the fat from several chapters. I've heard that "Innumeracy" is much better. Read that instead.

Rating:
Summary: read "innumeracy" instead
Review: I found this book disappointing. While some of the examples and anecdotes are interesting, and everything is very well written, I didn't really understand what the author's point actually was. I suggest that your time is better spent reading his other book, "Innumeracy", which is staggeringly good.

Rating:
Summary: Paulos continues with his amazing mathematical insights
Review: I saw the Salon review of this and promptly ordered it. A little trepidatious at first, I thought the book might be a rehash of Innumeracy and A Mathematician reads the Newspaper, which I loved. I was wrong. The book has Paulos's wry, witty tone and the many examples and insights are characteristically quirky, but the topic is very different - the similarities and differences between stories and mathematics, between their associated logics and world views, and the different mindsets they bring about. Somehow he relates Murphy's Law, the limited complexity of the human brain, topical news stories, bible codes, race issues, and many other amusing tidbits into a coherent argument about our place in the world. And there isn't an equation in sight.

Rating:
Summary: Superb! Fresh!
Review: I'll see with different eyes after reading this book. Paulos has such a fresh, different take on the world and story-telling - lying at Twenty Questions and its relation to "magical realism," the mathematics of con games, even the autobiographical asides. Superb!

Rating:
Summary: A strange and captivating mix of literature and math
Review: I've never read a book on mathematics or science with as much voice and attitude as this one. The similarities between narrative and mathematical thinking (and their differences) are startling and sometimes subtle. What keeps you going are the unusual insights, the witty and funny turns of phrase, and that voice and intelligence which seem to rise from the page. An English major and self-styled math phobe, I learned more about story-telling from this book than from some of my lit courses.

Rating:
Summary: Fast-paced, insightful and totally unique
Review: Of all the science books that I have read, there are only a few that I would classify as a must-read. I definitely put this book in that category. I have never read a Paulos before, and was amazed at how facinating the world of probability and statistics is when it is described this well! Authors of books about the wonders of the universe would be lucky if they could make their subjects as interesting as Paulos makes his.

There are four major concepts described in this book: the origins of probability and statistics (in particular how these subjects grew out of our natural observations of the world), the effect of subjective perspectives on our interpretation of both story and statistics, intensional logic (the still little-understood logical structure of this subjective interpretation), and information theory. The book takes a fast-paced, entertaining tour through these topics, and Paulos adds interesting personal anecdotes and bad (intentioanlly) jokes. The book concludes with a discussion of the chasm between the arts and sciences (and those who like to keep it that way).

If your looking for a detailed study of any of these topics, however, then this book may not be for you. But this is a good introduction to subjects you may no little about, but will most likely by facinated by when you finish reading.

Rating:
Summary: The split that wasn't there
Review: Paulos starts the book with a clearly absurd story, one that has numbers and statistics mixed in with a narrative. His question is, why is this so jarring? Why is it that people are literate and numerate, but so seldom both at once?

This book addresses that question. In part, he says that literature deals with many aspects of a few individuals, but statisticians generally study a very few aspects of very many individuals. He also notes that literature tends to treat each individual as a unique product of a unique time and place. In contrast, math and physics typically deal with cases where the specific individual is irrelevant. Any experiment on an electron gets the same result no matter which electron you use, or where, or when.

The dichotomy may not, in fact, exist. One could refer to the recent statistical studies of DNA data that have that literary much-about-few character and that often seek out the uniqueness of the study's subject. Part of Paulos's main point, however, is that reasoning in "human" prose is often just mathematical reasoning in street clothes. Other times, when day to day logic seems irrational to a simplistic "scientific" analysis, it turns out that there is a deeper kind of reasoning at work, and one that can be cast in formal terms.

Paulos delivers more than his nominal argument, though. His presentation is filled with little asides and self-referential humor. He is a logician after all, and, like the logician Lewis Carroll, uses his logic to create delightful unreason. Taken as a whole, it's a brief, enjoyable, and instructive look a the formal side of casual reasoning, and at the human side of mathematical logic.

//wiredweird

Rating:
Summary: read "innumeracy" instead
Review: The author deals in an original way with the difficult nexus between statistics and stories, between alpha- and betascience, without favouring one of them, and indeed arguing that both are complementary. This striking impartiality creates the space for original ideas about everyday-situations that every reader will certainly recognize. To be original about (seeming) banality, that is the work of a true great mind. The reason why I do not rate this book with the maximum score, is that it sometimes misses an overarching line of reasoning. The discursive path may strike some readers (like me) as too associative. Needless to say that such a style has its charms, but perhaps due to my Europe-continental education, I am a bit more at ease with a clear thesis and a transparant construction. Nevertheless: it is absolutely imperative to buy this book!