Reviews for Mathematical fallacies, flaws, and flimflam

The average rating for Mathematical fallacies, flaws, and flimflam based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-08-19 00:00:00 Christopher Beresford Dr. Dudley does not suffer cranks gladly. Yet despite the obvious irritation he feels toward them, he has written an entire book dedicated to their work. It is a strange mixture of tribute and cautionary tale. Beneath the warnings not to encourage cranks flows an undercurrent of grudging respect. Dudley even on rare occasions concedes to the logic of a particular idea, such as counting by twelves instead of tens. However, he stops short of admiration, and in fact actively promotes the discouragement of crankery at every opportunity, even providing sample replies to send to cranks in response to their fishing expeditions for validation. But part of me suspects that at some early point Dudley himself could have been just a few steps away from wandering down the crank path. It's possible that the dismissive, condescending tone he occasionally allows to creep into his authorial voice is one borne of a defensiveness rooted in his own inner crank. Maybe all mathematicians harbor an inner crank. After all, we so often criticize in others what we privately observe in ourselves. The book is written in an amusingly dry style, and the appeal of its content is likely heightened according to the level of one's understanding of math. Here are a few examples of chapter headings: -American Revolution, The Role of 57 in the -Bitterness, Cranks' -Consultation, Lack of, of Cranks with Experts -Encouraging Cranks, The Folly of -Insanity -Megalomania -Money to be Made in Mathematics, Lack of -Time, Wasted Since many of the cranks discussed did not intend for their work to be distributed to the general public, Dudley only refers to those cranks by initials (details on those who officially published appear in the Notes appendix, including George Kayatta, whose chapter alone makes this book worth reading [Google him for even more fun]). As Dudley rather cavalierly states in his introduction, 'it's really not important who they are'. I guess in his mind they are all lumped together as one formless aggregate of crankery. Or perhaps he secretly fears their subversive arrows directed at his tower of institutional math.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-01-15 00:00:00 Simon Miranda The world needs more math books that make us laugh. Mathematical Cranks is a tremendous amount of fun, but is probably only going to be enjoyable to people who absolutely love math. Take a look at the author's portrait on the back cover. If you're in a technical field and have had to sit and endure the experience of some painfully ignorant and self-important blowhard tell you how you're all wrong about things you know very well, you may end up looking like poor Professor Dudley. Cranks are the reason we have something called the "Dunning-Krueger Effect". If you're not familiar with it, look it up on Wikipedia and feel the room light up. Professor Dudley spends 350 pages methodically demolishing the mathematically incompetent. It's not one unremitting gripe-fest, though, as some ideas featured don't quite rise to the level of crankery--where this occurs, he says so frankly, and gives oddball ideas that appear to have some utility the credit they are due, particularly when their authors manage to refrain from promoting them in a patent-medicine-salesman's blaze of rapturous evangelism. The author enjoys himself tremendously at the expense of the more obnoxious variety of crank, and along the way teaches the reader more about math both in areas that are familiar, and in places only math majors go.