Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences
This is a book I’m reading mostly because of the response I had to Eugenia’s Cheng’s Unequal book. I had a hard time with that book mostly because I had a hard time being focused while the book was going. The first half of every chapter was great, but when the math part came, I completely lost focus becuase I couldn’t understand/relate to math being spoken. =)
I then had to go back to this book, because I consider Innumeracy one of the fundemental books that changed my view on math. I read it either my senior year in High school, or freshman year of college and prior to the book, I always felt that math was my bad subject. Something to suffer through and bite my lips and just GRIND through it.
This book changed my mind on math, and math education. Most math education everywhere is just BAD. They teach you a formula, or a bunch of things like proofs in geometry without TRYING to even tell the student how it can relate to real life. Innumeracy changes that. It shows you how everything in life can be seen as math, and its just how you relate to it that changes your feelings towards it.
This is the first book where I first found out about why the likelihood of finding extraterrestrial life is vanishing small (the universe is a very large space, and FTL travel is very unlikely). Where I found out how statistics makes a huge difference (context matters the most in statistics, and significance is important).
The problem I have with the book upon rereading is the TONE that John Allen Paulos has, which I have to say is rather condescending. It insults the common reader at almost every page (you guys are dumb, most folks are dumb, its ok to accept you’re dumb), perhaps not in such lurid terms, but you never forget that you’re being talked down to. =)
I could get past it, but if I had to say why innumeracy isn’t more popular as a book that’s the reason why.
I STILL prefer this book over that of Unequal. He makes the association of how everything is math very clear in the first few chapters, and there are almost never very many equations that are difficult to understand, and he makes it clear how its related in a way that I never felt with Eugenia Cheng’s book.
So I’m glad that my memories are mostly intact. this is still a seminal book of math education to most readers, if you can get past the condescension.
I just wish it was an audiobook so I could force my daughter to “read” it. but oh well. =)
Highly recommended.