How Not to Be Wrong

The Power of Mathematical Thinking

By: Jordan Ellenberg

Narrated by: Jordan Ellenberg

Length: 13 hrs and 29 mins

Publisher's summary

The Freakonomics of math - a math-world superstar unveils the hidden beauty and logic of the world and puts its power in our hands.

The math we learn in school can seem like a dull set of rules, laid down by the ancients and not to be questioned. In How Not to Be Wrong, Jordan Ellenberg shows us how terribly limiting this view is: Math isn’t confined to abstract incidents that never occur in real life, but rather touches everything we do—the whole world is shot through with it.

Math allows us to see the hidden structures underneath the messy and chaotic surface of our world. It’s a science of not being wrong, hammered out by centuries of hard work and argument. Armed with the tools of mathematics, we can see through to the true meaning of information we take for granted: How early should you get to the airport? What does “public opinion” really represent? Why do tall parents have shorter children? Who really won Florida in 2000? And how likely are you, really, to develop cancer?

How Not to Be Wrong presents the surprising revelations behind all of these questions and many more, using the mathematician’s method of analyzing life and exposing the hard-won insights of the academic community to the layman—minus the jargon. Ellenberg chases mathematical threads through a vast range of time and space, from the everyday to the cosmic, encountering, among other things, baseball, Reaganomics, daring lottery schemes, Voltaire, the replicability crisis in psychology, Italian Renaissance painting, artificial languages, the development of non-Euclidean geometry, the coming obesity apocalypse, Antonin Scalia’s views on crime and punishment, the psychology of slime molds, what Facebook can and can’t figure out about you, and the existence of God.

Ellenberg pulls from history as well as from the latest theoretical developments to provide those not trained in math with the knowledge they need. Math, as Ellenberg says, is “an atomic-powered prosthesis that you attach to your common sense, vastly multiplying its reach and strength.” With the tools of mathematics in hand, you can understand the world in a deeper, more meaningful way. How Not to Be Wrong will show you how.

©2014 Jordan Ellenberg (P)2014 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"Brilliantly engaging...Ellenberg’s talent for finding real-life situations that enshrine mathematical principles would be the envy of any math teacher. He presents these in fluid succession, like courses in a fine restaurant, taking care to make each insight shine through, unencumbered by jargon or notation. Part of the sheer intellectual joy of the book is watching the author leap nimbly from topic to topic, comparing slime molds to the Bush-Gore Florida vote, criminology to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The final effect is of one enormous mosaic unified by mathematics." (Manil Suri, The Washington Post)

"Easy-to-follow, humorously presented.... This book will help you to avoid the pitfalls that result from not having the right tools. It will help you realize that mathematical reasoning permeates our lives - that it can be, as Mr. Ellenberg writes, a kind of 'X-ray specs that reveal hidden structures underneath the messy and chaotic surface of the world'." (Mario Livio, The Wall Street Journal)

"Witty, compelling, and just plain fun to read.... How Not to Be Wrong can help you explore your mathematical superpowers." (Evelyn Lamb, Scientific American)

Great book

I found some of the mathematical equations difficult to follow by ear so it might be worth getting the digital version to follow along with, but I found the topic approachable and very interesting.

Reasoning

Lovely book on reasoning. I reccomend it to anyone interested in the study of critical thinking

I don’t write reviews

This book was ******* great! I really can’t explain how great it was. It’s worth your time.

Great story, but too many numbers for an audiobook

Very good narration! Very interesting to learn how apparently unconnected ideas are in fact connected. It would have been nice if the book had focused more on the concepts, ideas and story and had moved most of the supporting numerical data to an appendix.

Excellent book!

This is a great book for all. I think there is additional enjoyment for those with experience in higher mathematics. Jordan Ellenberg does an excellent job narrating as well. He is a trustworthy guide through a history of mathematicians and philosophers, ultimately arriving on a well crafted argument regarding the title of the book. I would love more narrated content from Jordan!

Well worth it

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

I looked forward to driving errands so I could listen to more of this book. The author has a knack for anecdotes that make just the right concrete point. The opening story, about fighter planes that come back with bullet holes in all the non-essential areas, was a perfect start to a cautionary section about selecting data bases and avoiding "survivor bias," which is as applicable to choosing high-performing mutual funds as it is to analyzing fighter plane vulnerabilities. He comes at each topic from a variety of angles, but has a firm enough grasp of his subject to tie them all together into the point he wants to make in each section.

Any additional comments?

I was sorry the author felt he had to reveal so much of his personal politics, but at least he chose aspects that illustrated what he wanted to say about reasonable and faulty styles of analyzing factual disputes. The whole book would have been worth it just for the discussion of how to spot shaky conclusions that depend on selecting a sample exclusively from data outliers, then inferring causation from the regression to the mean that ought to have been expected from the outset. (Thus some variety of the "_____ curse" that supposedly afflicts the performers with the best record in the first leg of a competition, when the rest of the season finds them performing at more their usual level.)

A great listen.

Anyone who wonders why and remains teachable will find much to love. For those who love maths and thought alike...well this is pure gold.

Excellent, engaging

Excellent, engaging review of topics in math and statistics that are indispensable for critical thinking in our complex world of claims and counterclaims.

Very enlightening

Interesting and enlightening. It is a little bit difficult to follow the equation and numbers in the audible version though. But one can still get a general idea.

listen to this before taking stats

Read this book before taking a stats class. It will make your life much better. fun and informative. Maybe if I had read this as a teenager I would have gone into the sciences....