Reviews for The arithmetic of life

The average rating for The arithmetic of life based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-10-07 00:00:00 Mark Laredo The author takes upon all aspects of life with a mathematical bent of mind. The book consists of a number of short anecdotes about life and mathematical calculation of the events and outcomes. I got hooked and purchased this one, when I read one such account, which involved, a teenager deciding to quit his college mid way and his father being furios at his decision. His elder brothers follows a more methodical approach and takes him to a library and both of them get the records of the labor department which shows the statistics of average salary over the degrees earned. They kind of derived a conclusion that, if he just puts in with the college for 2 more years, he would on an average, over his lifetime of next 40+ years, will be earn twice as much as he would earn by dropping out now. If that was divided by hours he is going to spend for next years, the amounted for a cost that is going to get for every hour. That aspect alone, convinces him to put up with just few more years and get done with his degree. After reading this account, I thought, I should buy and read this book completely. I don't regret it. I loved many stories which were presented. There are many suggestions on how to view situations in life, mathematically and assign values and draw up probabilities. The content is presented in a easy to read manner too. Sometimes, I had to avoid getting int some details, but just understand the overview. Overall, I liked reading this book.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-08-19 00:00:00 Pamela Holschuh Human beings are terribly bad at numbers especially large numbers and probability. This books consists of short fictional episodes that explain many aspects of our lives in numbers such as sports, incomes, life expectancy, risks and etc. that are indeed matters of life and death. Some of data are outdated - the book was published first in early 2000s, I believe,- some of the topics are not very interesting at least to me, but the way the author explains rather hard numbers and probability with interesting fictional omnibus episodes helps feel the numbers well. If a reader does not like numbers at all, this book may bring a little headache though none of arithmetic or statistics goes too wonkish. One possible complain about the book is that the book loses its focus a bit because it tries to cover wide range of topics in very short episodes. The whole book runs just about 200 pages. Overall, I enjoyed the book and would recommend it. We needs to be numerically more literate.