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Did British
royals live longer when the Church of England prayed for them?
Is beauty quantifiable? How do you know the sun will rise
tomorrow? These questions, and more, are answered in Michael
and Ellen Kaplan's new book, Chances Are: Adventures in
Probability.
Non-mathematically
minded people may find themselves getting a little logy at
the plethora of formulae presented in this charming book on
probability, but rest assured that grasping advanced topics
will not be necessary. This mother and son writing team blithely
blaze through the sometimes daunting territory of probability
and statistics, giving readers a "you are there" joyride through
mathematical discoveries showing them real-life applications
of the various theorems and formulae.
Gamblers
(and wanna-be playas), gamers, day traders, history buffs,
and comp-sci enthusiasts will all find plenty to mull over.
Every section introduces big topics, but the Kaplans present
them well and make them highly accessible to the average reader.
Television game show fans will especially enjoy the explanation
as to why it would have made more sense to switch to another
door on the 1970's game show "Let's Make a Deal."
Besides
the math, Chances Are contains a wealth of historical
factoids. For example, Florence Nightingale, whom we know
primarily as a nurse, was an early advocate of using statistical
evidence and tried to establish a Chair in Applied Statistics
at the University of Oxford. It was her use of statistics
(and some scary graphs) that helped convince people of the
need for sanitary conditions in hospitals. Adolphe Quetelet,
a Flemish scientist working in the early 19th century, decided
to incorporate his great love,of art into his profession—mathematics—to
see if beauty were indeed in the eye of the beholder. In his
studies, he discovered that beauty had criteria that went
across country and cultural lines, and thus was essentially
standardized. Quetelet's quantification of the ideal body
type is with us today in the form of the body mass index.
Francis
Galton, a 19th century British scientist and explorer (and
Charles Darwin's cousin) was interested in the efficacy of
prayer. People prayed for his study group—British monarchs—at
every service given by the Church of England. If prayer worked,
the monarchs should have enjoyed better health and a longer
life than their non-royal upper-class counterparts. In fact,
the mean lifespan of English monarchs was shorter. Reverend
Thomas Bayes was an amateur mathematician who died in 1763
and left his papers to a friend. In Bayes' essays, his friend
Richard Price found the perfect response to skeptic David
Hume, who famously said that the sun's rising yesterday doesn't
mean that the sun will come up tomorrow. Bayes' Theorem tells
us that the overall chance of thing B happening is based on
the probability of thing B having happened before. So if the
sun has come up every day since you were born, there's more
than a fair chance it will come up tomorrow.
After
reading this book readers will be able to impress their friends
with terms like "Pascal's Wager" and Bayesian probability,
and maybe even have a decent understanding of what those things
mean. The Kaplans do a fabulous job of making something normally
thought of as difficult and dry by non-mathematicians into
an exciting subject with real-world applications.
(April,
2007)
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