Overview

In our hyper-modern world we are bombarded with more facts, stats and information than ever before. Often these statistics can seem contradictory and say wildly different things depending on who is sharing them. So in a world where information is so slippery, what can we grasp hold of to make sense of it all? Professor of Information Theory Oliver Johnsons reveals how mathematical thinking can help us understand the myriad data all around us - from the exponentialgrowth of Coronavirus to the rise of social media filter bubbles, from share price fluncutations to the way that rumour spreads, from the datafication of our sports pages to the environmental concerns affecting our planet. Journeying through three sections - Randomness, Statistics and Information - we meet a host of brilliant minds including Alan Turing and Claude Shannon who have shaped the theories underpinning our understanding, and we are equipped with handy tools including the law of large numbers, the critical limit theorem and entropy. Lucid, surprising and entertaining, Numbercrunch supplies the reader with a definitive mathematician's toolkit to make sense of our surroundings, cut through disinformation, and truly understand how our world is changing.

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9781788708340

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Reviews

'The perfect introduction to the power of mathematics - fluent, friendly and practical.'-Tim Harford, author of How To Make The World Add Up 'Numbercrunch is a lucid, and, most importantly, entertaining, guide to the mathematics that forms the plumbing of the modern world. With barely an equation in sight, he makes a passionate case for how just a little bit more numeracy could help us all.'-Tom Whipple, Science Editor, The Times 'An excellent, straightforward introduction to the usefulness of numbers, which gets to the heart of why maths is so important to all for us.'- David Sumpter, author of The Ten Equations That Rule the World 'Numbercrunch is an invaluable addition to the modern baloney detection kit. Numbers don't lie but they often speak a foreign language. Professor Oliver Johnson is a superb maths-whisperer on a mission to arm his readers with the tools to distinguish sound claims from the many phoney ones that bombard us every day. Numbercrunch is an invaluable addition to the modern baloney detection kit.'-Ananyo Bhattacharya, author of The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann 'Oliver Johnson provides useful and timely insights by deploying simple but powerful mathematical techniques. Numbercrunch shows how to apply crucial ideas to a range of real-life problems. A valuable and topical guide to navigating the world of numbers, from sports transfers to medical testing.'-Adam Kucharski, author of The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread

Author Information

Oliver Johnson is Professor of Information Theory and Director of the Institute for Statistical Science in the School of Mathematics at Bristol University. He was previously a research fellow at Cambridge University and Fellow of Christ's College Cambridge. He has written on how information travels for Guardian and Observer, The Times and The Sunday Times, Spectator and Telegraph. He is on Twitter as @BristOliver, where he tweets about how statistics can help us make sense of the world and has almost 50k followers.

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