Shambhavi Gupta

“A reasonable person believes, in short, that each of his beliefs is true and that some of them are false.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“Cauchy was not interested in the needs of engineers. Cauchy was interested in the truth.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“Suppose you have a group of fifty experimental subjects, who you hypothesize (H) are human beings. You observe (O) that one of them is an albino. Now, albinism is extremely rare, affecting no more than one in twenty thousand people. So given that H is correct, the chance you’d find an albino among your fifty subjects is quite small, less than 1 in 400,* or 0.0025. So the p-value, the probability of observing O given H, is much lower than .05. We are inexorably led to conclude, with a high degree of statistical confidence, that H is incorrect: the subjects in the sample are not human beings.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“Nowadays, the Abrahamic argument—just look at everything, how could it all be so awesome if there weren’t a designer behind it?—has been judged wanting, at least in most scientific circles. But then again, now we have microscopes and telescopes and computers. We are not restricted to gaping at the moon from our cribs. We have data, lots of data, and we have the tools to mess with it.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not To Be Wrong: The Hidden Maths of Everyday