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A Numerate Life : A Mathematician Explores the Vagaries of Life, His Own and Probably Yours by John Allen Paulos is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is A Numerate Life : A Mathematician Explores the Vagaries of Life, His Own and Probably Yours about?

Employing intuitive ideas from mathematics, this quirky "meta-memoir" raises questions about our lives that most of us don't think to ask, but arguably should: What part of memory is reliable fact, what part creative embellishment? Which favorite presuppositions are unfounded, which statistically biased? By conjoining two opposing mindsets--the suspension of disbelief required in storytelling and the skepticism inherent in the scientific method--bestselling mathematician John Allen Paulos has created an unusual hybrid, a composite of personal memories and mathematical approaches to re-evaluating them. Entertaining vignettes from Paulos's biography abound--ranging from a bullying math teacher and a fabulous collection of baseball cards to romantic crushes, a grandmother's petty larceny, and his quite unintended role in getting George Bush elected president in 2000. These vignettes serve as springboards to many telling perspectives: simple arithmetic puts life-long habits in a dubious new light; higher dimensional geometry helps us see that we're all rather peculiar; nonlinear dynamics explains the narcissism of small differences cascading into very different siblings; logarithms and

Author

John Allen Paulos

Publisher

Prometheus Books, Publishers

Published

2016

Language

EN

ISBN

9781633881181

Subjects

Memoir, Mathematics, Science

Rating

3.59 / 5 (47 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14