Shambhavi Gupta

“But real-world questions aren't like word problems. A real-world problem is something like "Has the recession and its aftermath been especially bad for women in the workforce, and if so, to what extent is this the result of Obama administration policies?" Your calculator doesn't have a button for this. Because in order to give a sensible answer, you need to know more than just numbers. What shape do the job-loss curves for men and women have in a typical recession? Was this recession notably different in that respect? What kind of jobs are disproportionately held by women, and what decisions has Obama made that affect that sector of the economy? It's only after you've started to formulate these questions that you take out the calculator. But at that point the real mental work is already finished. Dividing one number by another is mere computation; figuring out what you should divide by what is mathematics.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“There is real danger that, by strengthening our abilities to analyze some questions mathematically, we acquire a general confidence in our beliefs, which extends unjustifiably to those things we’re still wrong about.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“We become like those pious people who, over time, accumulate a sense of their own virtuousness so powerful as to make them believe the bad things they do are virtuous too.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“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