Good grief, an alternate title could very well be "2020: all the ways the world will quantitatively fall apart." ( )

(Romanian translation) Explicații matematice ale unor lucruri foarte serioase sunt povestite clar si amuzant cu ambiția de a evita formulele și definițiile pe ne-am aștepta să le găsim într-o carte al cărui titlu începe cu "Matematica ...". O lectură adictivă! ( )

No Formulas. Just Numb3rs. In this book about how math shapes our lives, British math professor Yates doesn't take us into the algebra, geometry, and even trigonometry that we all use daily - whether we realize it or not. Instead, he takes an approach similar to the now decade old US television show Numb3rs, starring David Krumholtz and Rob Morrow, wherein he shows applications of higher level mathematics in fields such as epidemiology, medicine, law, journalism, elections, and several others. Yates cites real world examples including unjust convictions and Ebola outbreaks and many others to show how math was used incorrectly and what the math actually showed in that situation, to help the reader begin to get an overall sense of math without getting bogged down in the technical calculations. Truly an excellent book for even the more arithmophobic among us, as it shows the numbers all around us and explains how we can have a better sense of them.

Disclaimers: 1) I LOVED Numb3rs back in the day and would still be watching it if it were still on the air. 2) I have a computer science degree and very nearly got secondary mathematics education and mathematics bachelors degrees at the same time as my CS one - so obviously I'm a bit more attuned to math than others. ( )

Very interesting and readable book about how maths are important in everyone’s life ( )

One of the best mathematical books I have ever read. Teaching the real effect of mathematics ( mostly statistics and probability theory) with real-world stories made it fun to read. How a simple idea like dependent probability which we learn using dice examples in our school, can have a huge impact on the conviction in a murder case was eye-opening.

The book primarily talks about mathematical ideas like exponential growth, conditional probabilities, median vs mean, etc in a real-world context. As application of mathematics is exploding using data science and Machine learning, understanding these nuances of their application is very important.

Chapter 4 which talks about media misuse of statistics is highly relevant to today's fake news era.

The last chapter about mathematical epidemiology which concerns mathematical modeling of epidemics is one of the real needs of today's COVID-19 pandemic. It clearly shows why quarantine and lockdowns are important and gives a cautionary tale if it's not followed how fast an epidemic can spread.

The books leave us with single an important message

"Never take mathematical results as absolute truth. Always question the source of data, assumptions behind the model, and their biases.". Taking this attitude towards the mathematics as yet another tool to model the complex real-world makes it more potent rather than blind usage. ( )