La vida es matemática: Las ecuaciones que explican los avatares de nuestra biografía

by John Allen Paulos

Toda vida humana, asegura el conocido matemático John Allen Paulos, es una sutil realización de patrones matemáticos, y nuestra existencia obedece a ideas y ciclos gobernados por los números. Para explicar el papel que el cálculo estadístico, la teoría de probabilidades o las leyes de la lógica desempeñan en nuestra existencia, Paulos recurre a episodios de su propia biografía. Nos enteramos así de que padeció los estragos de un nefasto profesor de matemáticas o que todavía le remuerde la conciencia por haber tenido una pequeña influencia en la elección de George W. Bush como presidente de Estados Unidos. O de que los principios matemáticos gobiernan la esperanza de vida o las preferencias que nos inclinan a enamorarnos.

Genres: Mathematics, Nonfiction, Science, Biography

240 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 10, 2015

Reviews

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book much more than I did. Paulos's earlier book, "A Mathematician Reads The Newspaper," had a major impact on how I read news media. This book is a memoir, or a self-styled "meta-memoir", since Paulos attempts to comment on the genre of biography and autobiography throughout the book. He is particularly interested in the impact of mathematics on memoir.

The book ultimately disappointed me because it was so profoundly disjointed. Paulos chose not to employ a chronological approach, which is fine of course; but he doesn't make much of an effort at any kind of thematic organization at all. The result is a mishmash of musings that are difficult to follow.

Other quibbles I had:

--some of the mathematics are aimed at a higher level than the general audience for whom Paulos has most often written in the past, and Paulos wastes no time on explanation or introduction of many complex ideas or terms.

--Paulos seems fairly sex-obsessed, and even resorts to some bizarre bragging about his sexual exploits in Kenya ("risky sex, in several senses, in particular with the wife of a local chieftain with whom I regularly played cards", p. 100). I found this passage to be offensive, arrogant, and explicable only as masking a great insecurity.

I liked the way Paulos made me think about memory and memoir, raising questions about who we are (a collection of memories?) and how unreliable memory is.

There are touching personal passages here and there as well, but not enough self-revelation to make me recommend the book from an emotional point of view. And the points he tries to make are lost in the miasma of recollections, lame jokes, and sudden dives into disparate mathematical theorems.

[Luzie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mathematical musings on the matter of memoirs. Which theoretically sounds great, but unfortunately, the delivery is lacking. The book reads as follows: This thing happened to me, it is connected to this mathematical concept. By the way, this concept is also connected to this thing in human lives. Oh also, there is more theory. And maybe more connections to life. Chapter over. Rinse and repeat.
I think, rater than telling the story from the point of view of the life events and trying to then connect them to the maths, it would have better to set it up in the opposite way, explaining the maths and then showing how it relates to life. This way the delivery would have been a lot cleaner.

I was also wondering who the intended audience is. The maths explanations are quite basic for anyone who knows maths. But then, I doubt most people without a mathematical background would understand them the way the mathematical concepts are thrown in and explained in text. (Even though they might look scary, there is a reason why we have formulas after all.)

[☘Misericordia☘ ⚡ϟ⚡⛈⚡☁ ❇️❤❣ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Q:
True to my doubts, what I've written is a meta-memoir, even an anti-memoir. Employing ideas from mathematics (quite broadly and non-technically construed) as well as analytic philosophy and related realms, but requiring no special background in mathematics, I've tried to convey some of the concerns and questions most of us don't, but arguably should, have when reading biographies and memoirs or even when just thinking about our own lives. The “arguably” is the burden of this book; imparting a certain modicum of mathematical understanding and biographical numeracy is its presumptuous goal. (I say presumptuous because of the nebulousness of the notion of biography and the vast variety of different biographies. In a more concrete direction there is the specificity of the book's focus on conventional biographies, mine and probably yours.) (c)
Q:
I'd always appreciated literal interpretations of figurative phrases (such as “this is only a fraction of what you'll pay elsewhere,” where the price is 5/3 of that elsewhere), self-reference, unusual juxtapositions and permutations, logical paradoxes, and incongruities of one sort or another, all elements of humor and, what is less well known, mathematics (c)
Q:
How does one tell a life story or, more accurately, selected parts of it?
To what extent is the choice of incidents related likely to be biased—statistically, psychologically, otherwise?
How should we evaluate past decisions (or future ones)?
What kind of plastic, ephemeral, or nominal entity is the self?What can one say of the general shape or trajectory of a life story?And what roles do chaos, coincidence, probability, topology, social media such as Twitter, quantitative constraints, and cognitive delusions play in our lives and in their depiction in biographies?
Some of the specific questions addressed herein are:How might the notion, borrowed from mathematical logic, of nonstandard models of axiom sets be relevant to the predicting of our futures?
How are our lives, in a profound sense, joke-like?How does nonlinear dynamics explain the narcissism of small differences sometimes cascading into siblings growing into very different people?
How can simple arithmetic put lifelong habits into perspective?
How can higher-dimensional geometry help us see why we're all literally peculiar, far-out?
How can logarithms and exponentials shed light on why we tend to become jaded and bored as we age?
How can probability and card collecting tell us anything about our so-called bucket lists and the contingency of life's turning points?
...
How can algorithmic complexity and Shannon entropy balance past accomplishments and future potential?
How can we find the curve of best fit that captures the path our lives have taken? (c)

[Kent Winward · Rating 4 out of 5]

"A Numerate Life: A Mathematician Explores the Vagaries of Life, His Own and Probably Yours" by John Paulos, the mathematician is more rumination on the mathematical failings of biography and autobiography rather than anything particularly about Paulos.

As a caveat, I'm a little geeky on the math stuff and I find it fascinating that the more you experience that mathematically the more likely you are to end up in the same place as other people with lots of experience. It certainly has proved true with reading -- the more I read, the more things coalesce into a coherent thought system that is harder and harder to break free from to experience something fresh.

[Christopher G. Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Life is a puzzle filled with paradox and contradictions. Trying to make sense of one’s life has been the preoccupation of poets, painters, writers, philosophers and playwrights throughout recorded time. When it comes to a person writing a memoir he or she is selecting a few hundreds pieces and leaving countless pieces inside the box that is his or her life. And from how those pieces fit, the public and private records matching, or colliding, the reader of the memoir is made to feel a whole life has been revealed, not in it’s entirety but in the salient, defining detail.

When a mathematician picks up a pen to write a memoir, there’s another language to draw upon—symbols, equations, axioms, conjectures, and theorems. Like music is a language structured by grammar and syntax. It is a rare mathematician who can accurately translate the language of mathematics into the literary language where metaphors and similes must carry the heavy weight of meaning from mathematical objects. John Paulos has been in the forefront of mathematicians who have opened a vital channel of communication between the elite community who are fluent in mathematics and the rest of us who struggle with a small vocabulary sufficient to count loose change.

Behind mathematics are a number of concepts including scientific measurement, objectivity, non-linear dynamics, and Gödel's incompleteness. Without mathematics the ability to make forecast, prediction not to mention innovation and technology would collapse back into the world of magical thinking, belief and faith. In Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up brought the rigors of mathematics to dispel the delusions behind the idea of ‘God.’ In other words, Paulos has demonstrated drone-like capability of hitting long-range targets without the need to offer equations that explain the underlying mathematics of velocity. Irreligion was a tour de force in the projection of intellectual power.

In his memoir, A Numerate Life, Professor John Paulos displays a rare combination of literary skill honed by a broad range of reading in telling his life story. Along the way he brings his professional knowledge of mathematics as a way to help us understand his way of selecting pieces of the puzzle. His books, essays and articles follow the tradition of C.P. Snow and Bertrand Russell, seeking to bridge the rest of us to the scientific community where mathematics is the crown jewels.
His best selling book Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences established his international reputation as one of mathematics foremost explainers connecting the lay public to the world of complex math. His public role as a rational, scientific thinker offers an alternative to the perverse and misguided populist pride that celebrates innumeracy in the tradition of the ‘know nothing is cool’ crowd that one finds in certain social media quarters.

Facebook posters post messages such as: “Well, another day has passed. I didn’t use algebra once.” The irony that Paulos would appreciate is that it is neglecting on small feature: the Internet and all modern technology is underpinned by a deep understanding of mathematics. The cognitively lazy are caught in awkward constructs where they are imprisoned by their ignorance paradox, the God delusion, and biases, beyond the reach of a meta-analysis. The Numerate Life is a lifeline for those with an open mind and willingness to explore the nature of these paradoxes and puzzles that are all around us.

John Paulos’ memoirs A Numerate Life: A Mathematician Explores the Vagaries of Life, His Own and Probably Yours , His Own and Probably is a highly original and creative self-examination of the forces in his life that have given geometry to his own thinking, preoccupations and perceptions. A Numerate Life is a rare glimpse into these life-defining forces that have shaped a world-class mathematical mind. The window of perception opens a world in which mathematics becomes the default mindset to solve puzzles, and think about the probabilities of things happening or not happening over time. What makes the book memorable is the author’s fluent prose style, his humor and his knack for finding the right metaphor or illustration. It’s a twisty journey along the author’s psychological Amazon with stops along the way to explore probability, coincidence, randomness, consciousness, memories, other travel, the experiences inside the cauldron of family, friends, children, domestic household, work, and the meaning of mortality. And there are card tricks. Paulos’s psychological journey is also shows the role of chance. This memoir has a lovely recursive element of a mathematician explaining how mathematically thinking is the best we can do when dealing with chance.

When shuffling the deck that we all are given to play, Paulos’s insight into the game, the players, the phantom of rules popping into and out of existence, the bets we make and the basis on which we place those bets, or how others place them for us, makes A Numerate Life a powerful and enduring book. You will find the intellectual and emotional toolkit displayed in this memoir a celebration of wonder, chance, dedication, wit and a window that shows how one man has played his cards in public and how we all have come out the winner. As an example of a mindset honed to embrace complexity and uncertainty, the open-ended nature of life, A Numerate Life will shine a light along your path, letting you know that you aren’t alone. Read this book.

[Paulo · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a mathematically inspired autobiography of the mathematician John Allen Paulos. He gives a vision of how you can see life (life as a sequence of events in the future of a concrete person. He speaks from his own experiencies using a mathematical point of view.

The book has neither a chronological nor a thematic approach, and for that it's a bit difficult to follow. Sometimes he seems to have no clear path or purpose in what he is telling. Besides, there is no depth in mathematical thinking; it stays a bit short on that aspect.

Paulos writes about memory, raising questions about who we are and how unreliable, inaccurate or fabricated memories are. Life is a puzzle filled with paradox and contradictions.Some of the subjects he deals with are the turning points of one's life or how much weight do you give to past accomplishments and how much to present abilities when assessing a person's life. But at all times Paulos stays true to the tagline in its title--it's a bundle of vagaries.

Finally, a quote from the book. Paulos says he finds «biographies to be somewhat inadequate in getting at what a person is like. I've cited paradoxes, counterfactual assertions, straightforward lies, mistaken assumptions, bizarre interpretations, statistical solecisms, cognitive foibles and just plain wrongness, but much of what I write in this book can be stated rather succinctly».

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paulos has written several books, and the resultant exposure has exposed him to certain recurrent questions. One of his favorites is, should math students be allowed to use calculators? Short answer: yes. Long answer: the question betrays a completely blinkered view of what math is. Just as literature is not typing, math is not computation. Repeat: math is not computation.

Managing expectations skillfully, Paulos says at one point: “I am that rather odd creature: a mathematician who writes, and therefore I am perhaps a bit like a dog who plays chess: what’s remarkable is not that the dog isn’t very good at the game, but that he plays at all.”

Recently I read “Proofiness: the Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception” by Charles Seife. Seife recounts a tale of the museum guide who informs his audience that the fossil dinosaur is 68 million and 9 years old: the extra 9 years because that’s how long he has been working at the museum. For Seife this was part of a chapter specifically on what he calls “disestimation”; Paulos refers to it but briefly as simply “laughable precision.” I prefer Paulos’ style, if only because he eschews annoying neologisms like “disestimation.”

I had no idea until I read this book that Paulos is the mathematician who contributed the concept of “numeracy” (and perhaps more importantly, the inverse concept of “innumeracy”) to our lexicon. So, you could argue that perhaps he is a neologist after all, just a more successful one. This silly thing I have just written is not unlike the sort of thing one finds in the book: full of diffident asides like that, as if they occurred to him while writing and could not resist putting them in.

The reading experience is somewhat nonlinear. It is vaguely biographical, but also about biography in general, and about how humans and their lives embody mathematical principles. There are, weirdly, also at least four passing references to porn, which I started to find a bit incongruous after about the third time. I got used to the style as the book progressed, and I progressed to liking the author.

About biography – thinking about that museum guide quoting laughable precision about the dinosaur age, Paulos says

shouldn’t we find it just as laughable when someone claims to be relating someone else’s verbatim conversations, as well as their dates, locations, and context? …Biographers, and of course autobiographers, select themselves in part because they resonate in one way or another with the subject. They may interview many people about their subject, but even their choice of interviewees is likely to be influenced by their biases. So are the questions they ask – rephrasing them over and over, if they don’t get the answer they want. Pick almost any potential biographical subject and ask ten people who know him or her what they think of the person, and the responses will certainly be quite varied. …Approaches to biography, or even everyday storytelling, that depend on the conjunction fallacy are quite common. It’s interesting watching how some people effortlessly embroider, exaggerate, gerrymander, and invent details to concoct a compelling little anecdote out of the sparsest and most ordinary of incidents.

Continuing to discuss how, as he puts it, the (biographical) facts under-determine the story, Paulos says “the problem is a bit like trying to find a cubic polynomial through only two points in a plane: lots of very different curves will do.” I’m nodding my head at that… I intuitively get it, but if it doesn’t make any sense to you, this might be an annoying book.

The mathematician continues: “as the Löwenheim–Skolem theorem in mathematical logic shows, the undisputed first-order axioms of arithmetic or set theory have nonstandard models: not just the intended ones of their familiar whole numbers, or the intuitively understood interpretations of basic set theory. The fact is that most sets of axioms – say those for some abstract algebraic or topologic structure – will admit many surprising models, punch lines to the axioms as it were, just as our later lives are punch lines to our earlier lives.” This is connected to reasoning that generally shows human lives to be chaotic and unpredictable, subject to “the butterfly effect.”

He quotes Kahneman several times in the book, and Kahneman’s distinction between the “experiencing self” and the “remembering self” serves as a further useful reflection on the hazards of biographical recollection. He then explains Benford’s law, which describes the frequency distribution of digits in many real-world data sets and speculates about an as-yet undiscovered psychological version of Benford’s law. “If too many memories from a certain period of one’s life, or too many with an observer’s perspective, or too many vivid remembrances, or too many of the wrong kind for a given period of one’s life are related in an autobiography, or a biography, then deceit or at least exaggeration becomes a likely possibility.”

Just as we are, a la Sagan, all “star stuff”, Paulos avers, and tries to demonstrate throughout the book that we are also “math stuff.” The last chapter of the book contains an affecting and wistful recollection of his father, and then he closes with a surprisingly moving passage:

Nothing at all, and the set containing nothing at all, are not the same notion. Although neither my father, nor anyone, nor anything is in the empty set, the empty set itself is procreative. A well-known fact of set theory is that from the empty set, one can construct or generate all the whole numbers, all the real numbers, in fact, all of mathematics. If we’re made out of math stuff in one sense or another, then maybe the procreativity of the empty set can be extended. Though it contains nothing at all, the empty set might be able to generate not only all of mathematics, but my father’s lopsided Cheshire grin as well.

[Jim Razinha · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had a four hour flight for the final leg home from Paris and decided to finally devote the time to reading this, as it's been on my shelf for a few years. I've liked all of Paulos's book that I've read, and this didn't disappoint. Less about numbers and math- oh, they're there, as they've been an integral part of his life, so not really much less - and more about parts of his life, it's also a look at biographies and autobiographies in general. Memory is tricky, and despite the courts' acceptance of it, eyewitness accounts are inherently flawed...even if it's yours. Some readers were thrown off by the less than linear flow and dinged Paulos...more's the pity, and I do pity them for their myopia. Oh, I'm on record more than once railing at incoherent stream-of-consciousness fictions, but while this is a story, there is still a logical transition between vignettes and semi-order to it.

So Paulos, at the age of 70 - he's older than I had in my head, despite reading him for nearly 30 years - sets out to collect some of his life observations and flesh them out to a larger examination of the life worth living. It's not a long book - 192 pages plus cites and an index, but there is a lot here. I'll just list the chapter titles and subtitles in case that prompts an interest.
1) Bully Teacher, Childhood Math: some early estimates, speculations
2) Bias, Biography, and Why We're All a Bit Far-out and Bizarre: bias mindsets, statistics and biography
3) Ambition vs. Nihilism: infinity, sets , and immortality
4) Life's Shifting Shapes: primitive math, life trajectories, and curve fitting
5) Moving Toward the Unexpected Middle: a few touchstone memories
6) Pivots - Past to Present: Kovalevsky, prediction, and my gramdmother's petty larceny
7) Romance Among the Trans-humans and us Cis-humans: roboromance and the end of biography
8) Chances Are the Chances Are: if only...probability and coincidences, good, bad, and ugly
9) Lives in the Era of Numbers and Networks: how many e-mails, where did we buy that- the quantified life
10) My Stock Loss, Hypocrisy, and A Card Trick: my stock loss and a few pitfalls of narrative logic
11) Biographies: Verstehen or Superficial: consciousness, biographies, and shmata
12) Trips, Memories, and Becoming Jaded: topology, travel, and a Thai taxi driver

A few of the many parts I marked and margin-noted...

The so-called conjunction fallacy, or Linda problem, suggests a related pitfall of just-so stories with little evidentiary value. [...]
As with the Texas sharpshooter foible, approaches to biography or even everyday storytelling that depend on the conjunction fallacy are quite common. It's interesting watching how some people effortlessly embroider, exaggerate, gerrymander, and invent details to concoct a compelling little anecdote out of the sparsest and most ordinary incidents. [this book was published in 2015...before Prince Twit-terer was promoted to King Twit-terer] Munchausen syndrome, whereby healthcare providers and/or patients exaggerate reports and add false details to obtain sympathy, attract attention, or portray themselves as heroes, is an extreme example. [see previous insert observation]
My predilection has usually been just the opposite. I find excessive enthusiasm suspect and often feel compelled to report neutral facts that undermine the tendentious slant of any story I read and thereby drain it of much of its. drama.

That last paragraph speaks to me. And sometimes I am labeled "negative" or "curmudgeon" for it. On observed moments in our lives:

I'll end with a common set of usually faux turning points: milestone multiples-of-ten birthdays, thirty, forty, fifty, and so on. To underline their artificiality and lessen the dread that often accompanies them, I sometimes point out to people that their age can be expressed less traumatically in a numeral system with a different base. Happy 40th Birthday, for example, becomes Happy 34th Birthday in a base-12 system...

I've mused and groused about artificial milestones many times! (...knowing full well the artificiality of "mile"stones!)
One part I won't detail here, for it's a bit long, demonstrated an interesting aspect of probability - something humans have a difficult time with, but I'll summarize: if one has two people with a tendency to not always tell the truth, the probability of them both telling a lie independently is easily calculated (after assuming some factors of truthiness). But...and this is important in 2017/18...particularly early October 2018, if the second person says something in support of something the first said, the probability that whatever that first person said is true goes way down! On mortality

Becoming a grandparent or simply getting older usually brings about a keener sense of mortality. Few unasked questions are more human than: How much longer do I have? How many more times will I travel here, eat there, do this or that thing I've enjoyed (or simply endured) doing?

To which I always add my question: "How many more books can I read?"

So, the non-linearity did not bother me, and the maths are always stimulating - even if I don't share his love of topology (Martin Gardner was another aficionado) or have ever really understood Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem - and I enjoyed the story, connected with many of the revelations, and found a few more books to add to my List.
Recommended.

[Gerson Gonzalez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un interesante intento de relacionar la escritura de biografías y las matemáticas mediante vivencias del propio autor, destaca su manera divertida de narrar las historias y simplicidad al explicar teorías matemáticas

[María Salas · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wonder if someone edited this book, and in that case, I wonder if that person was a mathematician too. I say this because I see no other way this rambling made any literary sense to any reasonable editor.

The premise of the book is great, a mathematician analizing daily aspects of his (and somehow our) life?? Bring it on!..but it turned out to be a mathematician overly trying to analize every aspect of the world, mentioning random thoughts about his previous books, mixing it with complex mathematics and pretending they are delivered in a simple way for every kind of reader.

My attention got lost so many times throughout this book, I remember liking those 2 or 3 pages when he wrote about coincidences, that time he kinda messed up politics with an essay and those little facts about every day choices we make thinking we got a better deal than we did.

[Gnuehc Ecnerwal · Rating 2 out of 5]

Neither entertaining nor informative. This author took wild and reckless extrapolations, from his own experiences to a series of claiming 'we all do this...'. Taking superficial parallels between math concepts and observations about life and society, the author propose a serious of analogies that are at best amusing, but are mostly a tenuous and pointless stretch of the imagination. Overall, a scent of 'humble brag' permeates the book. It is not uncommon for writers who are prominent in one specific field to extend their expertise into other fields, to try to apply the concept from one to explain phenomenon in the other, relying on unscientific analogies and metaphors. It seldom lead to any reliable insights, let alone real knowledge.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hard to rate because I'm not sure exactly what it was supposed to be, but it was enjoyable. I liked his mathematical look at life itself and different situations. We need more clear thinking like that, although there is some concern that algorithms take all the fun out of life, and the spice out of romance, so temperance is needed. It was a little rambly, as you'd expect from a mathematics professor. Otherwise, it made me want to read some more mathy books (but not math books) and biographies, even though he criticises the concept of biographies.

[Jacob Negley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an odd book. Loosely an autobiography while commenting on the genre of autobiography, often involving mathematical formulas and theories (along with a healthy dose of psychology). I didn't necessarily love it, but I feel this might stick with me. It'll be interesting to see how I reflect on this in the future. Very much look forward to reading Innumeracy after completing this one (which sadly is not available as an audiobook).

[Darnell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely not for everyone, but it's basically exactly what it promises: a meandering anti-memoir. The book is like hanging out with someone you may not always like or agree with, but who you generally find interesting. Requires being reasonably comfortable with math.

[Konstantinos Papalias · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent! A sane choice to merge math and everyday life. This guy is a true math preacher.

[Baylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

More fun from Paulos, this time with a little more personal lens, but always with lots of good mathematical thinking.

[Bob Gustafson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I expected a lot better.

This is not an autobiography, rather it is a mathematical description of how to write an autobiography.

[Sisco M Berthereau · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sinceramente, esperaba un llibro con más analogías matematicas, con más ejemplos que justifiquen el título.
Ha sido une libro ameno de leer, pero sin más
Como científico, me esperaba más

[Tracy · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was weak enough that I didn’t bother finishing it. When he started talking about sex for no reason for the umpteenth time, I stopped and threw it in my waste basket.

[Pete · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Numerate Life (2015) by John Allen Paulos is a mathematically inspired autobiography of the mathematician and writer John Allen Paulos. Paulos wrote the excellent Innumeracy, A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, Beyond Numeracy and other books.
In the book Paulos ruminates over his own life and ponders how well we really know people in biographies, the self, how well we know ourselves and intersperses a lot of mathematical and cultural remarks. The book doesn't, however, provide a great deal of information
The book isn't bad. If you have read and enjoyed Paulos' other books you may well like this. However, it's definitely not his best. It seems to be more of a book for himself and people who like his writing a great deal than a general book for most people. It's the weakest of his books that I've read.

[Richard Fuhr · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paulos's autobiography is a wonderful combination of anecdotes (some funny, some touching) from his life, bits of mathematics along the way, and reflections on what it means to write an autobiography. Call those parts of the book a meta-autobiography. Early in his story he describes some events in his youth that inspired him to become a mathematician. They involved a disagreement between Paulos and one of his teachers regarding how an earned run average should be properly calculated in baseball. Paulos had mathematics on his side; the teacher had arrogance. Mathematics triumphed over arrogance. This example, and many other recollections and mathematical tidbits along the way, make this book a very enjoyable and absorbing one to read.

[Ellen Barrett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Delightful and Enlightening
I just finished reading A Numerate Life and found it delightful and enlightening. More interested in literature, I've never been good at math and have long suffered from math anxiety, but I'd read so much about Paulos' books that I decided to try his new one. I loved the very unusual memoir that runs through the book and was surprised to find that I also understood the math parts, which were intuitively explained and shed real light on the biographical points he made throughout the book. Excellent.
ᐧ

[Alex · Rating 2 out of 5]

Paulos writing in this book, though somewhat entertaining, strikes as meandering and convoluted at times, not because of any mathematical or theoretical material (on the contrary, those passages are the best parts of the book), but because he seems to have no clear path or purpose for each chapter. Since it's not an autobiography and it's not presenting any sort of concrete thesis or idea, A NUMERATE LIFE stays true to the tagline in its title--it's a bundle of vagaries, and nothing more.

[Ria F · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not an autobiography although there are autobiographical pieces, somewhat cynical of biographies as a whole, interesting approach to applying math to real life (there is actual maths saying you will not be the most popular person on your chosen social network) Geometry shows why it's weird and bland and boring to be "normal" but don't worry very few of us are!


Really enjoyed this book - will be reading his prior books when I get a chance

[Kristy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely an easier read if you have a math background....I don't but still enjoyed it. Makes one look at everyday occurrences in a new way. Enjoyed the bits of philosophy and humour!

[Mills College Library]

Biog P331p 2015

[Lucila Armentano · Rating 2 out of 5]

Muy aburrido, no profundiza nada, es muy liviano y los temas que va mencionando rozan la irrelevancia...

[Elena · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reflexiones interesantes.

Un poco disconexo. Entiendo que es una colección de ideas, pero ganaría con un poco de estructura.

[Anthony Faber · Rating 4 out of 5]

Basically a grab bag of math & science stuff. I enjoyed it.

[Tom Green]

Thought this was primarily an autobiography, not commentary on autobiographies with autobiographical elements thrown in for examples.