“A welcome addition to the math-for-people-who-hate-math genre...All but the stubbornly innumerate will enjoy this amusing mathematical miscellany.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Kit Yates is a brilliant explainer and storyteller. Perhaps most charming of all, his stories are a bit like Sherlock Holmes tales: mysteries whose solutions seem surprising an...
“A welcome addition to the math-for-people-who-hate-math genre...All but the stubbornly innumerate will enjoy this amusing mathematical miscellany.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Kit Yates is a brilliant explainer and storyteller. Perhaps most charming of all, his stories are a bit like Sherlock Holmes tales: mysteries whose solutions seem surprising and then elementary, once the clever reasoning behind them is revealed. I loved this book and learned something on every page.”
—Steven Strogatz, professor of mathematics, Cornell University, and author of Infinite Powers and The Joy of X
“Kit Yates shows how our private and social lives are suffused by mathematics. Ignorance may bring tragedy or farce. This is an exquisitely interesting book. It’s a deeply serious one too and, for those like me who have little math, it’s delightfully readable.”
—Ian McEwan, author of Atonement
“Kit Yates is a natural storyteller. Through fascinating stories and examples, he shows how math is the beating heart of so much of modern life. An exciting new voice in the world of science communication.”
—Marcus du Sautoy, author of The Music of the Primes
“Used wisely, mathematics can save your life. Used unwisely, it can ruin it. A lucid and enthralling account of why math matters in everyone’s life. A real eye-opener.”
—Ian Stewart, author of In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed the World
作者简介
· · · · · ·
Kit Yates is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mathematical Sciences and codirector of the Centre for Mathematical Biology at the University of Bath. He completed his PhD in mathematics at the University of Oxford in 2011. His research demonstrates that mathematics can be used to describe all sorts of real-world phenomena: from embryo formation to locust swarming and from ...
Kit Yates is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mathematical Sciences and codirector of the Centre for Mathematical Biology at the University of Bath. He completed his PhD in mathematics at the University of Oxford in 2011. His research demonstrates that mathematics can be used to describe all sorts of real-world phenomena: from embryo formation to locust swarming and from sleeping sickness to egg-shell patterning. His research into mathematical biology has been covered by the BBC, The Guardian, The Telegraph, the Daily Mail (London), RTE, Scientific American, and Reuters amongst others. Alongside his academic position, Kit is also an author and science communicator. The Math of Life and Death is his first book.
Time Flies When You're Getting Old
One theory notes that our metabolism slows as we get older, matching the slowing of our heartbeats and our breathing. Just as with a stopwatch that is set to run fast, children's version of these "biological clocks" tick more quickly. In a fixed period of time children experience more beats of these biological pacemakers (breaths or heartbeats), making them feel as if a longer time has elapsed.
A competing theory suggests that our perception of time's passage depends upon the amount of new perceptual information we are subjected to from our environment. The more novel stimuli, the longer our brains take to process the information. The corresponding period of time seem,s at least in retrospect, to last longer. It might be that rather than time actually slo... (查看原文)
Mathematics provides multiple ways to be economical with the truth. The stats proclaimed in newspapers, championed in ads, or spouted by politicians are frequently misleading, occasionally disingenuous, but rarely completely incorrect. The seeds of the truth are usually contained within their figures, but rarely the whole fruit. Sometimes these distortions are a result of willful misrepresentation, while on other occasions the perpetrators are genuinely unaware of the bias they are imposing or the errors in their calculations.
In his classic book, How to Lie with Statistics, Darrell Huff suggests that "despite its mathematical base, statistics is as much an art as it is a science." Ultimately, the degree to which we believe the stats we come across should depend on how complete a picture ... (查看原文)
2020年一月刚刚出版的这本The math of life and death 是一本难得的好书。作者用讲故事的方式娓娓道来数学在生活中无处不在的应用，从金字塔骗局（pyramid scheme)到基因检测的局限，从法庭中曾经对数字解读错误引来的误判，到数学家如何用数学模型来证明疫苗的必要。作者用极...
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1 有用 MackAFish 2021-10-26 15:49:26
科普读本中写得挺不错的作品，可以给7颗星。大部分讨论的例子对于学过本科阶段概率论的小朋友来说应该都不陌生。最后一章关于数学在流行病学、公共卫生中的应用其实写得不错，但是这本书出版于2020初，所以略过了在这次冠病疫情中展现出的数学模型的局限性。希望再版的时候可以增加这一部分
0 有用 Yama Chen 2022-05-16 16:43:36
算這領域的入門書，但值得一翻
1 有用 吾往 2020-02-03 23:54:28
浅显易懂, 也有意义的科普书.
0 有用 Yama Chen 2022-05-16 16:43:36
算這領域的入門書，但值得一翻
1 有用 MackAFish 2021-10-26 15:49:26
科普读本中写得挺不错的作品，可以给7颗星。大部分讨论的例子对于学过本科阶段概率论的小朋友来说应该都不陌生。最后一章关于数学在流行病学、公共卫生中的应用其实写得不错，但是这本书出版于2020初，所以略过了在这次冠病疫情中展现出的数学模型的局限性。希望再版的时候可以增加这一部分
1 有用 吾往 2020-02-03 23:54:28
浅显易懂, 也有意义的科普书.