New Book by CSICOP Fellow John Allen Paulos
SkeptInq@aol.com
Sun, 8 Nov 1998 13:09:37 EST
CSICOP Fellow John Allen Paulos has a new book out this month. It is titled
Once Upon a Number (November, 1998, Basic Books) and it is about the gap
between stories and statistics, or, more generally, between a personal agent-
centered view of the world and an impersonal, scientific view of it. The book
is a sort of mathematician's take on C.P. Snow's two cultures, the literary
and the scientific, and, via unusual examples, vignettes, parables, and
puzzles, attempts to bridge, or at least illuminate, the gap between narrative
and number.
Dr. Paulos has written Mathematics and Humor (1980), I Think, Therefore I
Laugh (1985), Innumeracy - Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences
(1989), Beyond Numeracy - Ruminations of a Numbers Man, (1991), and A
Mathematician Reads the Newspaper (1995).
For more information check out his website at:
http://www.math.temple.edu/~paulos