How Not to Be Wrong
Petra B. Taylor, Professor of Engineering, Thayer School of Engineering
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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.