A Numerate Life: A Mathematician Explores the Vagaries of Life, His Own and Probably Yours

If you were a math-and-science-for-dummies student as I was, maybe you gained whatever advanced knowledge you have of those disciplines, as I did, from reading the works of a handful of writers who were not only experts in their fields but also great prose stylists. Loren Eisley was the first such writer I encountered, although I recall some early young adult reading like Microbe Hunters and Martin Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis, which Paul de Kruif, the author of Microbe Hunters, had a hand in writing.I got most of the science basics I needed to get by in the world in the eighth grade from Mr. Ochse, a towering grey-haired man and great teacher who modeled his style after Mr. Science and looked a lot like his Dickensian name suggests. It wasn’t until I had children of my own that I encountered David MacCauley’s The Way Things Work, which would do a lot for science literacy if it were a required text in most junior high schools science classes. In the classical tradition I read, for example, T.H. Huxley’s A Piece of Chalk and Michael Faraday’s A Chemical History of a Candle. Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle also comes to mind. One can go back to Galileo: “Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina,” his earliest defense of the Copernican system. And I’ll throw in Hippocrates and Aristotle’s Parts of Animals (one of his more accessible works).In other words, my science education was a St. John’s University Great Books kind of education: science as literature, including science fiction and great science-themed movies like The Life of Louis Pasteur, which is pretty much how I know the little that I know. As long as I didn’t have to do the math or pose a danger to myself and other students in a science lab, I learned something. In more modern times, which is our interest here, I was able to secure a working knowledge of biology, astronomy, physics, and the neurosciences by reading E.O. Wilson, Lewis Thomas, Chet Raymo, Richard Morris, Oliver Sacks, Floyd Skloot (In the Shadow of Memory), and others. I’ve also admired generalists like Dava Sobel and Natalie Angier, and the best book of among this sort of list still remains James Watson’s The Double Helix.However, for the longest time the most I could get ever out of mathematics was Edwin Abbott’s Flatland, for which, in a recent Signet paperback edition, John Allen Paulos contributes a new Foreword. Paulos’ 1968 landmark bestseller Innumeracy: Mathematical Literacy and Its Consequences complemented the first math course I ever took (called Finite Math, in my first two semesters at Penn State University Abington, 1970-71) that I actually understood. (I would never have known about Paulos had I not seen him on the old David Letterman Show, but—full disclosure—I have gotten to know him since as a friend of his and his brilliant wife, my former colleague at Temple University, whom he lovingly tributes in this recent memoir.) We learned things like the rudiments of the binary system that operates modern computers and the secret to unlocking Bacon’s cipher (to “prove” he had written Shakespeare’s plays). For once I could actually begin “to deal comfortably with the fundamental notions of numbers and chance”—the opposite of innumeracy (Paulos coined that word, which is now in our language). Here was a witty, concise, thought-provoking author, writing almost entirely in the first-person, who, like Mr. Glasser, my math professor, could point out in an uncomplicated and entertaining way the connection of mathematics to almost anything in the world you can think about. By the time I got to graduate school, I wrote my own mathematical short story as part of my Masters’ thesis called “Leuben,” about a man I read about it Ripley’s Believe It or Not who bet that he could turn over a deck of cards in a certain order. It took him 10 hours a day, 20 years, and 4,246,028 time before he did it. (Paulos happens to mention that “there almost 10 to the 68th power—a one with 68 zeroes after it—orderings of the 52 cards in a deck.”)At the dawning of the age of the ATM Machine Paulos wrote:I’m always amused by commercials for banks which tout their personalized service, which service amounts to a poorly trained and badly paid cashier saying, “Good morning” and then promptly fouling up your transaction. I’d rather go to a machine which knows me by some code word but on whose operating programs a team of software writers has painstakingly worked for months.Paulos pointed out two things that were of great importance in my thinking—that if you weren’t understanding numbers you weren’t really appreciating baseball (something I talked about in my own baseball books—available on Amazon). As to the Orwellian nightmare of the individual being reduced to a mere figure, like your social security number, “a number in these contexts enhances individuality," Paulos argued. "No two people have the same credit-card number…whereas many have similar names or personality traits or socioeconomic profiles.”Having written books on mathematics in relation to what you read in a daily newspaper, the stock market, literature, and the better odds that god does not exist, Paulos’ latest book is a casual autobiography. It is entertaining and illuminating “quasi-memoir” (sometimes anti-memoir, memory being what it is) by an author whose style is most reminiscent of the great Italian modernist Italo Calvino, with his magician’s grab bag of linguistic gymnastics, whom Paulos, a bit of an old Qfwfq himself, no doubt admires and whose Cosmicomics novels are further great readings for the literary-math-and-science-minded.As with all his books, mathematics is the main character. Indeed, the first question for any life, he writes, is ‘What is its average length?’ or perhaps a more visceral ‘How long have I got?’” Admire, as I do, Paulos’ many humorous asides, digressions, and observations of all those math-oriented problems in life we never stop to think about: the relative risks in riding a bike (who, under the age of 50, grew up wearing a helmet while learning to ride a bike, let alone wearing a seat belt in what were pretty unsafe cars? Spend a morning watching cars and kids on bikes go by and you might think you are living in 1952. What about the improbability of Santa Claus? Only a “cool math nerd” thinks in those terms. And he’s right. Once you begin to understand why Paulos loves math you begin to see board games like Monopoly in a completely different way. “Implicit in the game…are a number of mathematic ideas that one absorbs while playing the game. That will get you to rethink some childhood memories! And those are the sorts of pithy observations one encounters in countless ways throughout A Numerate Life, whether it’s the relative value of ordering two small or one large pizza (go with the large) or the scatterings of Cheerios or the “artificiality” of milestone birthdays. It’s not all mathematics A Numerate Life is like reading Sartre with numbers. It is a mediation on life, the writing life, and writing about one’s life. If Paulos’ Irreligion (2008) dispelled for him the probability of God (I told him that I’d be willing to concede that there is a God, if someone could just prove to me which God), he at least has “mathematics as a kind of omnipotent protector.” Once in a while the math might go over your (well, my) head, but never enough to keep you from reading on. And do read on. You’ll appreciate even more the last few pages—a soliloquy to Paulos’ father, which beautifully encapsulates a lifetime in just three pages and ends with a coda—a mathematical metaphor that circles back to an anecdote that begins the soliloquy.

John Paulos' A Numerate Life is a delightful exploration of the inherent problems in both autobiography and biography. He explains those problems clearly as he takes the reader though a brief history of his own life up to the time of the book's publication.Gödel's incompleteness theorem (approximately): All systems are either incomplete or self-contradictory. The self-referential system of an autobiography is both. A short example of self-reference: This sentence is false. It's impossible to determine the veracity of that sentence. Paulos' book about Paulos tells his own story and simultaneously tells why the reader, and the author, need to take such stories with a large grain of salt.Interesting and entertaining--I recommend reading the book.To keep in the spirit of self-reference, I also recommend you read my review of the book, though you can skip the final paragraph.

John Allen Paulos is one of the best mathematicians of our time. The Numerate Life is one of those page pausing books. You get to the end of the page and you want to move on but you realize that maybe it's in your best interest to make sure you understand fully the mathematics that was just mentioned. He puts things in such a way that gives even the common person the ability to understand mathematics. However, a reread is often needed so you do not find yourself trying to stumble through Paulos' explanation of ERA or collecting the entire set of baseball cards. Numerate Life is some of his best work to date. I often wonder if maybe Paulos is a professor of English at Temple as opposed to Mathematics but alas he throws at you the classic Paulos humor that can only be found in a math classroom. Nerdy, quirky, and above all, honesty is the way Paulos talks to us through his books.This is the book to get for any math nerd or wanna be nerd, not sure who wants to be a nerd of math but hey I'll put in this review, and we can only hope that Paulos will continue to share his wits and humor with us for years to come. Unlike Paulos short baseball career, this is not a swing and a miss. He goes yard multiple times and the best part...this is after the steroid era.

A Numerate Life (2015) by John Allen Paulos is a mathematically inspired autobiography of the mathematician and writer John Allen Paulos. Paulos wrote the excellent Innumeracy, A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, Beyond Numeracy and other books.In the book Paulos ruminates over his own life and ponders how well we really know people in biographies, the self, how well we know ourselves and intersperses a lot of mathematical and cultural remarks. The book doesn’t, however, provide a great deal of informationThe book isn’t bad. If you have read and enjoyed Paulos’ other books you may well like this. However, it’s definitely not his best. It seems to be more of a book for himself and people who like his writing a great deal than a general book for most people. It’s the weakest of his books that I’ve read.

Not his best work. This is a rambling and anecdotal account. without much math.