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eBook
Randomness
1999,1998
Overview
From the ancients' first readings of the innards of birds to your
neighbor's last bout with the state lottery, humankind has put
itself into the hands of chance. Today life itself may be at stake
when probability comes into play-in the chance of a false negative
in a medical test, in the reliability of DNA findings as legal
evidence, or in the likelihood of passing on a deadly congenital
disease-yet as few people as ever understand the odds. This book is
aimed at the trouble with trying to learn about probability. A
story of the misconceptions and difficulties civilization overcame
in progressing toward probabilistic thinking, Randomness
is also a skillful account of what makes the science of probability
so daunting in our own day. To acquire a (correct) intuition of
chance is not easy to begin with, and moving from an intuitive
sense to a formal notion of probability presents further problems.
Author Deborah Bennett traces the path this
process takes in an individual trying to come to grips with
concepts of uncertainty and fairness, and also charts the parallel
path by which societies have developed ideas about chance. Why,
from ancient to modern times, have people resorted to chance in
making decisions? Is a decision made by random choice \"fair\"? What
role has gambling played in our understanding of chance? Why do
some individuals and societies refuse to accept randomness at all?
If understanding randomness is so important to probabilistic
thinking, why do the experts disagree about what it really is? And
why are our intuitions about chance almost always dead wrong?
Anyone who has puzzled over a probability conundrum is struck by
the paradoxes and counterintuitive results that occur at a
relatively simple level. Why this should be, and how it has been
the case through the ages, for bumblers and brilliant
mathematicians alike, is the entertaining and enlightening lesson
of Randomness .
Publisher
Harvard University Press
Subject
ISBN
0674107454, 9780674107458, 9780674107465, 0674107462
