Paulos offers a hillarious account of how the stock market both follows and defies mathematical principals. He offers an enagaing overview of everything from "betas" to the efficient market hypothesis.
The preeminent explicator of mathematical logic to non-mathematicians, John Allen Paulos is familiar to general readers not only from his bestselling books but also from his media appearances, including "The David Letterman Show" and National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation" and "Science Friday", as well as articles in Newsweek, Nature, Business Week, the New York Times Book Review, The Nation, New York Review of Books, and The London Review of Books. Paulos originally wrote this charming little book on analytic logic, its mathematics, and its puzzles in 1985. And as in his later books, he uses jokes, stories, parables, and anecdotes to elucidate difficult concepts, in this case, some of the fundamental problems in modern philosophy.
The human imagination seems able to explore two very different worlds: the realm of mathematics, statistics and exact science, and the contrasting world of personal experience. This book explores the unexpected relationships that tie these two worlds together.
In diesem brillanten Essay zeigt der amerikanische Mathematiker John Allen Paulos, wie unsere Unfähigkeit, das Gesetz der großen Zahlen und die damit verbundenen Wahrscheinlichkeiten zu verstehen, Regierungsentscheidungen beeinflusst, persönliche Entscheidungen verwirrt und unsere Verwundbarkeit gegenüber allen Arten von Pseudowissenschaften erhöht.
In this book, Paulos argues that our inability to deal rationally with very large numbers results in misinformed governmental policies, confused personal decisions and an increased susceptibility to pseudo-sciences of all kinds. The discussion is illustrated with many quirky stories and anecdotes.