How much time do you typically give yourself to get to the airport? If you are like me and have never missed a flight, then, according to Jordan Ellenberg, author of How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking, you may be spending way too much time at the airport.
Ellenberg uncovers profound mathematical ideas in a myriad of real-life scenarios (including basketball, the lottery, elections, obesity, brain cancer, hyperbolic geometry, 19th century French criminology, and “torturing the data until it confesses," to name but a few). With his purposefully non-technical expository tone and entertaining style, Ellenberg shows that mathematical thinking can be a pleasurable activity. He masterfully shows that mathematics is not a boring set of rules to be memorized but rather "an atomic-powered prosthesis that you attach to your common sense, vastly multiplying its reach and strength.”
I have to run: my flight is boarding—after three hours in an uncomfortable seat at the gate.