Numbercrunch: A Mathematician's Toolkit for Making Sense of Your World

by Oliver Johnson

'Lucid and entertaining. With barely an equation in sight, Numbercrunch makes a passionate case for how just a little bit more numeracy could help us all'
- Tom Whipple, The Times

'The perfect introduction to the power of mathematics - fluent, friendly and practical'
- Tim Harford, bestselling author of How to Make the World Add Up

In our hyper-modern world, we are bombarded with more facts, stats and information than ever before. So, what can we grasp hold of to make sense of it all?

Oliver Johnson reveals how mathematical thinking can help us understand the myriad data all around us. From the exponential growth of viruses to social media filter-bubbles; from share price fluctuations to the cost of living; from the datafication of our sports pages to quantifying climate change. Not to mention the things much closer to ever wondered when the best time is to leave a party? What are the chances of rain ruining your barbecue this weekend? How about which queue is the best to join in the supermarket?

Journeying through three sections - Randomness, Structure, and Information - we meet a host of brilliant minds, such Alan Turing, Enrico Fermi and Claude Shannon, and are equipped with the tools to cut through the noise all around us - from the Law of Large Numbers to Entropy to Brownian Motion.

Lucid, surprising, and endlessly entertaining, Numbercrunch equips you with a definitive mathematician's toolkit to make sense of your world.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Mathematics

329 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 2, 2023

About the author

Librarian Note: There are more authors with this name.

Reviews

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I follow Professor Johnson on Twitter, and found him a helpful, moderate source of information during the pandemic. He is a keen communicator of mathematical ideas and I still found him engaging in this, significantly longer, form. I am not quite the intended audience- I have a maths degree- but I would say there is something here for everyone. And if every journalist and pundit would read even just chapter 7, our media would be so much better for it.

[Sudhagar · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not sure the actual objective of the author in writing the book.

There are far better books on this topic and the good professor offers no new insights or better explanation on his selected maths topics. Perhaps only new thing in this book is about Covid and the related statistics and data. However, even in this topic, the good professor stumbles by trying to justify some of the official view points (of which he's a part of). The Covid pandemic is a minefield for mathematicians and scientists and if I am one, I would try to steer clear due to the strong emotions, misinformation and the failure of maths, science and AI to live up their lofty promises.

I also find some issues with the way the concepts are explained as this could easily confuse someone unfamiliar with maths.

All in all, if you are familiar with maths, there is nothing new in this. Even if you are new to maths, there are far better books to start with.

[Brainstorm · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was a joy to read. I know it was meant as a very casual scrape of the surface to teach an average person to think more critically of how they perceive the world and the data they have of it, but I was still left yearning for more information on more than one occasion.

I used to listen to podcasts of scientists telling about their experiences and struggles with the corona virus, and I know that it was a very topical subject to pick for this book as well. But still, it felt very tiring to read about the topic once more, no matter how important the information was. Yet, I feel for every scientist who has felt like their face is going to melt with all the misinformation and people not understanding statistics and viruses.

[Annarella · Rating 4 out of 5]

I appreciated how the author based the book on the logic and not on pure algorithm or formulae. An unusual and intriguing book, with food for thought and interesting ideas.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this arc, all opinions are mine

[Vincent · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maths book that teaches me new things that is also useful in daily lives. Using Covid as a timely thread to connect different areas of maths together makes it down to earth. A must-read, worth revisiting from time to time.

[Daniele · Rating 2 out of 5]

I feel the title of this book should have been “Number Crunch: 12 ways numbers make sense of COVID.” There was too much of an emphasis on the pandemic, which irked me. Overall I didn’t find this a very enlightening read.

[Mark Hoyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

thoroughly engaging account of how mathematical thinking can help make sense of the world written in an engaging way, it eschews formulae in favour of explaining the thinking behind them.

[Ashish · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some parts of the book are interesting; most will be familiar to the mathematically literate.

The target audience is probably the less math literate folks.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fairly succinct and clear example of this genre of books. Especially interesting were the frequent examples pertaining to the pandemic.

[Trevor Vick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Useful toolkit using mathematical concepts to analyse everyday occurrences

[Daniel Lawson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent as a stats introduction and motivation textbook. I'm not the audience but I enjoyed the anecdotes.