Numbercrunch

This is a mathematician's toolkit for cutting through wall-to-wall informationoverload and making sense of our modern world.

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'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 home: 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.