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Naive Decision Making: Mathematics Applied to the Social World
How should one choose the best restaurant to eat in? Can one really make money at gambling? Or predict the future? Naive Decision Making presents the mathematical basis for making everyday decisions, which my often be based on very little or uncertain data. Professor Korner takes the reader on an enjoyable journey through many aspects of mathematical decision making, with relatable observations, anecdotes and quotations. Topics include probability, statistics, Arrow's theorem, Game Theory and Nash equilibrium. Readers will also gain a great deal of insight into mathematics in general and the role it can play within society. Suitable for those with elementary calculus, this book is ideal as a supplementary text for undergraduate courses in probability, game theory and decision making. Engaging and intriguing, it will also appeal to all those of a mathematical mind. To aid understanding, many exercises are included, with solutions available online."
- GenresMathematicsEconomics
Kindle Edition
First published October 16, 2008
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About the author
T.W. Körner
13 books9 followersThomas William Körner (born 17 February 1946) is a British pure mathematician and the author of school books. He is titular Professor of Fourier Analysis in the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity Hall. He is the son of the philosopher Stephan Körner and of Edith Körner.
He studied at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and wrote his PhD thesis Some Results on Kronecker, Dirichlet and Helson Sets there in 1971, studying under Nicholas Varopoulos. In 1972 he won the Salem Prize.
He has written three academic mathematics books aimed at undergraduates, and two books aimed at secondary school students, the popular 1996 title The Pleasures of Counting and Naive Decision Making (published 2008) on probability, statistics and game theory.
He studied at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and wrote his PhD thesis Some Results on Kronecker, Dirichlet and Helson Sets there in 1971, studying under Nicholas Varopoulos. In 1972 he won the Salem Prize.
He has written three academic mathematics books aimed at undergraduates, and two books aimed at secondary school students, the popular 1996 title The Pleasures of Counting and Naive Decision Making (published 2008) on probability, statistics and game theory.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 19, 2009
[I dont normally include the math books I read here, but I liked this one a lot and I had already written a review of it for MAA ONLINE, so I thought I would post some excerpts here, even though the overlap of my friends with the target audience may be quite small.:]
It has been my experience that when a mathematician hears the phrase "applied mathematics" they are most likely to think of thing such as heat equations and partial differential equations. On the other hand, when a civilian hears the phrase they are more likely to think of questions of probability, statistics, and game theory. T.W. Korner has embraced this latter definition, and written a delightful book entitled Naive Decision Making which looks at a number of ways in which mathematics can be used to help make a wide variety of decisions in social settings. He constructs a wide variety of models investigating a wider variety of questions and along the way delves into some of the history of the topics as well as giving examples from literature. Most of the topics covered in his book are things that will be familiar to most MAA members, but many of the individual applications and historical information will not be. The author admits that most of his models will be simplistic and ignore how people actually behave, acknowledging that he may be "like an astronomer who locks herself in a windowless room in order to think undisturbed," but defending the approach by arguing that "it is remarkable how successful [this approach:] is in the few cases when it does work."
[...:]
Naive Decision Making is a book full of pleasure. The writing is crisp, clear, and full of wit. Korner has managed to strike a nice balance between chatty and technical, between formal proofs and illustrative examples, and between breadth and depth of the topics considered. When trying to decide where on my bookshelf this book belongs, I had a very hard choice to make: There is quite a bit of history, but this is not a history book. There is quite a bit of theory explained from an elementary level, but this is not a textbook. Most of the text is written in the style of one of the many "pop math" books that have come out in recent years, but then you run into a page of equations. Korner certainly assumes some familiarity with calculus and combinatorics and the notions of proof and abstraction that a layperson would be unlikely to have, but he does not assume much more than that. Luckily, the decision of where to put the book on my shelf has been a theoretical one so far, as I keep lending my copy out to other people. I have already referred a number of my students and colleagues to this book, and I am sure I will refer more in the future. In short, recommending Naive Decision Making is an easy decision to make.
It has been my experience that when a mathematician hears the phrase "applied mathematics" they are most likely to think of thing such as heat equations and partial differential equations. On the other hand, when a civilian hears the phrase they are more likely to think of questions of probability, statistics, and game theory. T.W. Korner has embraced this latter definition, and written a delightful book entitled Naive Decision Making which looks at a number of ways in which mathematics can be used to help make a wide variety of decisions in social settings. He constructs a wide variety of models investigating a wider variety of questions and along the way delves into some of the history of the topics as well as giving examples from literature. Most of the topics covered in his book are things that will be familiar to most MAA members, but many of the individual applications and historical information will not be. The author admits that most of his models will be simplistic and ignore how people actually behave, acknowledging that he may be "like an astronomer who locks herself in a windowless room in order to think undisturbed," but defending the approach by arguing that "it is remarkable how successful [this approach:] is in the few cases when it does work."
[...:]
Naive Decision Making is a book full of pleasure. The writing is crisp, clear, and full of wit. Korner has managed to strike a nice balance between chatty and technical, between formal proofs and illustrative examples, and between breadth and depth of the topics considered. When trying to decide where on my bookshelf this book belongs, I had a very hard choice to make: There is quite a bit of history, but this is not a history book. There is quite a bit of theory explained from an elementary level, but this is not a textbook. Most of the text is written in the style of one of the many "pop math" books that have come out in recent years, but then you run into a page of equations. Korner certainly assumes some familiarity with calculus and combinatorics and the notions of proof and abstraction that a layperson would be unlikely to have, but he does not assume much more than that. Luckily, the decision of where to put the book on my shelf has been a theoretical one so far, as I keep lending my copy out to other people. I have already referred a number of my students and colleagues to this book, and I am sure I will refer more in the future. In short, recommending Naive Decision Making is an easy decision to make.
Read
March 12, 2018read some parts, this is a very impressive and useful book applying the mathematics of probability, game theory, and preference ranking to activities like gambling, insurance, voting, marriage, etc. However, this reads like a lower-level undergrad math course textbook in the vein of "A Readable Course in Real Mathematics" by Rosenthal-- written informally as an introductory sample platter to the basics of different math branches, but with mathematical notation generously used and with a lot of exercises embedded throughout the text. This means to get through the material one has to do the exercises, devoting perhaps a month of broken down study and attention to this book, writing and cross-referencing the lemmas and theorems like any other math text. I don't have that much time or sustainable interest or ability in probability but perhaps others would!
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