Awesome.

Lots of good insights here around data, estimates, studies, etc. Gave me new insight in reading & thinking about studies that populate the news. Great advice in the last chapter! Definitely over my head in a few spots and would take multiple readings to really feel comfortable with the content.

A must-read for anyone who's ever asked "What will I use this for?" in math class; Jordan Ellenberg says it all better than I could.

Ellenberg gives an approachable view of maths. This was recommended by a co-worker, and so far so good. As the marketing material said, sort of Freakonomics for maths. If you are into maths, you'll probably like some of the narratives, and if you're just into putting pieces together and trying to figure out the world with an analytic bent, you'll probably like it, too.

Math is fun #dealtwithit

I did not enjoy this book like I wanted to. The issue is not degree of math difficulty, he does not go math deep. His discursive storytelling and tendency to insert a tangent within a tangent too often loses the thread on an idea.

The topics are familiar; e.g., problems with the p-value. Some of the reviews suggest he is great at simplifying difficult math. But sorry this just is not the case. Much of this book is exactly the opposite: relatively basic statistics rendered more difficult by too much meandering. Too many times, he fails to setup an idea (scaffolding I think it's called), appearing to favor instead a storytelling (narrative) angle. Often I wished he would just hover on a concept, introduce it fully, before launching into a tangent, or nested tangents (not kidding). In this way, many of the ideas are neither solid introductions (as if to a new learner) nor really additive to somebody with experience; e.g., Bayes Theorem gets a very familiar introduction. I realize I am contrary to most of the glowing reviews and specific commentary, but I simply struggled to keep my interest due primarily to his writing style--maybe serial sidetracks add to the fun for other readers?--not his selected topics or even his ideas. Some of the ideas are really interesting! Sometimes I just lost my train of thought when he gets cute and self-aware, like I do reading some of the For Dummies books (I realize this is just style, some people really like the author joking with them a lot I guess, after a certain point, it's just too self-aware for me, I start to get distracted by the author behind the words). But that's not why I struggled. I struggled due to the conversational zig-zags, cute sidetracks and compounding excursions. The book just begged me to skim it, at every chapter.

Like his use of the lottery to illustrate expected value, a basic concept to which his chapter adds nothing as far as I am concerned. It gave me a little headache. I challenge somebody to summarize his answer to chapter's first sentence, "Should you play the lottery?". He uses an Adam Smith quote as a straw man ("The vigor of Smith’s writing and his admirable insistence on quantitative considerations shouldn’t blind you to the fact that his conclusion is not, strictly speaking, correct.") which he rejects under a silly and unfair reading of the quote, then finds his way around to accepting the idea of the quote, but only if we conditionally interpret Smith in what I would call an intuitive way (apparently, the Smith is correct in a non-strict way.). I had to read it all twice to realize the idea was much simpler than the discussion. It's not exactly an elegant discussion of expected value. And he concluded with a "certified three-point plan" which includes the seemingly contradictory "2. If you do play Powerball, don’t play Powerball unless the jackpot is really big." I went back and twice tried to comprehend the reason for this piece of advice, but I could not figure out what he was saying. Like some other sections, I had to re-read it carefully only to realize that I did not learn anything new.

The book introduces several paradoxes. I ended up referring to wikipedia for clarity, like when I reached the Saint Petersburg and Ellsberg paradoxes. Not because he's not smart, he clearly is. I just found myself preferring a clear introduction. In those two cases, I'd still prefer the wikipedia entries.

I really like his blog, I am a fan of his internet writing. I noticed he recently developed a cool metric which aims to "identify books people are buying but not reading." (http://quomodocumque.wordpress.com/2014/07/06/hey-whats-that-book-youre-not-reading/). I thought to use his metric on his own book, right? The top five highlights (at the time of this writing, of course) average 30.4 out of ~437 pages, which (according to my quick calculations) is ~7.0%. That sounds about right to me, although I read 100% of the book.

I already wrote a review for this book, but it's under the Kindle edition (which is somehow a separate entry).

Spock would love this book.