Kit Yates is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mathematical Sciences and Co-director of the Centre for Mathematical Biology at the University of Bath.
This is Kit’s second book after his first entitled The Maths of Life and Death, which was a Sunday Times Science Book of the Year.
I first became aware of Kit Yates during the Covid lockdowns, when a group of concerned scientists set up Independent Sage, which became a useful and trusted source of information on the progress of the (still ongoing) pandemic for my family, especially as my husband was clinically vulnerable.
I am a scientist by training, but maths, and especially statistics, was always a necessary evil that had to be battled through. This book makes maths accessible and even “fun”. My 14-year-old daughter was a willing test subject for the many challenges throughout the book, which nicely illustrated that our brains are hard wired in certain ways, meaning that “logical” decisions are often plain wrong, and can at worst allow us to be the victims of disaster or fraudsters.
There are many mathematical pitfalls for even highly trained scientists to fall into, and expert witnesses, who know they must always be non-partisan and not stray from their own area of expertise, would do well to take note of Kit’s warnings.
There are plenty of scientific examples of the use (and misuse) of predictive maths in science, from climate change to pandemics to drug trials, and Kit gets the balance right between delving into the science but keeping the level accessible. There is a comprehensive reference section, for those wanting to find out more.
There are plenty of amusing stories and hints and tips, for example, how the makers of the iPod had to change their shuffle feature to be non-random to reduce the number of complaints about strings of songs “proving” that shuffle was not “random enough”; or how seemingly improbably coincidences are more common that you think; and how to improve your chances of winning the lottery.
If you want to be more mindful of how you approach probability or bias in your work, or just read some interesting anecdotes about common misunderstandings of how real-world maths works, this book is for you.
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