Reviews for Mathematical Conversations: Selections from The Mathematical Intelligencer

The average rating for Mathematical Conversations: Selections from The Mathematical Intelligencer based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-01-09 00:00:00 Stephen Dudley When I was a child, I have always been impressed by the beauty of science, the beauty that lies in simple yet powerful laws, and rigorous theoretical frameworks deduced from straightforward ideas. After I started working as a scientific researcher, the motivation for me to do science, however, gradually disappeared. I am so overwhelmed by all the lemmas, propositions, and theorems. I started to question the meaning of academic works. As a PhD in probability theory and statistics, I knew most content of this book already, but I still enjoyed reading this small book. It brings me back to my childhood, when I started to appreciate mathematics and science. It has done a good job, as claimed in the title, to bring the pleasures of probability to the readers. Five stars.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-07-01 00:00:00 James Tuite An easy read since I finished up a stats course last term (I got to skip most of the math explanations). It was an interesting look at probability and I think it would be a good starter book for those who aren't very well-versed in math. I certainly wish I'd found this when I started learning Probability myself as the examples were so thoroughly explained in essentially layman's terms and everything was very easy to understand. Also with an example entirely about poisson distribution of chocolate chips in the baking of cookies, how can you go wrong? :P