The Math of Life & Death: 7 Mathematical Principles that Shape Our Lives (2019) by Kit Yates9/6/2022
The Math of Life and Death: 7 Mathematical Principles That Shape Our Lives by Kit Yates
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Human Math Stories I’m a math dunce—I got a C in basic algebra only because my friends coached me—so it was daunting to start The Math of Life & Death: 7 Mathematical Principles that Shape Our Lives (2019) by Kit Yates. Luckily, the mathematical biologist’s book was entertaining, informative, and much more comprehensible than I’d feared it’d be. Yates wants to “emancipate” us from our phobias about math and to show us that math is for everyone. Although he didn’t mathematically emancipate this lazy reader, Yates is a clear writer, and his many real-life examples (human stories) of the power of math to affect every aspect of our daily lives (and deaths!) are compelling, so I’m glad to have listened to his book. Here follow summaries of its seven chapters. Chapter 1: Thinking Exponentially: The Sobering Limits of Power Covers exponential growth and exponential decay via examples like pyramid schemes, viral marketing, Internet memes, the atomic bomb (harrowing), population, and technological advances. Luckily, exponential growth phenomena tend to reach a point of unsustainability where they collapse due to lack of resources. Chapter 2: Sensitivity, Specificity, and Second Opinions: How Math Makes Medicine Manageable Introduces the limits on accuracy of screening tests for conditions like pregnancy, breast cancer, HIV, etc., including false positive and false negative results, the false alarm problem in ICUs, and the calculations determining who gets meds and who has to pay for them, etc. The moral is: always get at least a second test/opinion! Chapter 3: The Laws of Mathematics: Investigating the Role of Mathematics in the Law Covers the way that math (statistics, probability analysis, etc.) is (mis)used in legal cases; explains median vs. mean; variables like gender, age, and wealth that warp test results; how DNA evidence may be misused or misinterpreted; and the Prosecutor’s and the Defenders’ Fallacies (looking at statistics only in the light they favor one’s case). Chapter 4: Don't Believe the Truth: Debunking Media Statistics Shows how to understand and assess numerical “proof” and how ads use numbers misleadingly; explains flaws in statistics like small sample sizes, selection and confirmation bias, and cherry picked, framed, and fake statistics; explains regression to the mean; details the Birthday Problem (how likely it is in a group of people that two will share the same birthday); assesses whether concealed carry gun laws reduce or increase gun violence; reveals which container of jellybeans to choose from if you want to get a minority red among the majority whites. Yates’ says that we need the context and source for data if we're going to believe it. Chapter 5: Wrong Place, Wrong Time: When Our Number Systems Let Us Down Says interesting things about different number systems, like the Sumerians’ base 60 (!), computer programming’s base 2, and our base 10, including how errors in decimal places may have devastating effects; also covers the history of time zones (normalized for train schedules etc.), the metric system (the US being the only industrial country not to adopt it). His conclusion is that we should try to avoid our (almost) innate binary decision making. Chapter 6: Relentless Optimization: From Evolution to E-commerce, Life is an Algorithm Covers the history and nature of algorithms (rules to produce certain outputs); explains the use of algorithms for different situations like organizing record collections, making routes for deliveries, packing for trips, and using car navigation; urges us to scrutinize algorithms with our human judgment, especially how their outputs are used and how their often biased inputs are set up; says interesting things about algorithms in nature, like the swarming of ants and fish and evolution generally. And—hey—Yates shares his system for choosing the best restaurant, train carriage, or checkout counter, etc. from a set of options, advising us to reject the first 37% before choosing the next best one relative to the earlier rejected ones. *I thought that in chapter 3 about math and law or here in chapter 6 about algorithms, he’d touch on “predictive policing,” but he’s silent about it.* Chapter 7: Susceptible, Infective, Removed: How to Stop an Epidemic Relates the history and nature of infectious diseases (e.g., measles, Ebola, HIV, chickenpox, gonorrhea, etc.) and the use of mathematical models (e.g., Susceptible Infective Removed [SIR] and Basic Reproduction Number) to track, predict, avoid, eliminate, and make policy for them. Covers contact tracing, quarantining, herd immunity, vaccinating, and anti-vaxxing, etc. This chapter has extra resonance for our coronavirus era, which began shortly after Yates published his book. Epilogue: Mathematical Emancipation Yates closes by highlighting how the current of math runs below the way we communicate, navigate, shop, relax, get medical care, find answers to questions, and so on. He points out that math can save or end lives, is only as useful as the people using it, and is in some situations inferior compared to human judgment. And he urges us to check math, bias, and sources, and generally to take the power of math into our own hands. One good way to do all that is through human stories which reveal or reflect mathematical models and help us understand them. I confess that Yates lost me most every time he embarked on a nuts and bolts explanation of some mathematical principle or method, partly because I listened to the audiobook. He reads speedily, so before I could absorb a given point, he’d already be running on to the next one, so I had trouble remembering many of his explanations after hearing them in real time. A minor kvetch is that, although Yates’ Manchester accent is appealing, he likes attempting accents for quotations from French, Belgian, Italian, or American figures (including Texans, Trump, and Obama), but he doesn't do them well. An unnecessary distraction. View all my reviews
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