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Numbercrunch

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What to expect

'Lucid and entertaining. With barely an equation in sight, Numbercrunch makes a passionate case for how just a little bit more numeracy could help us all'
- Tom Whipple, The Times

'The perfect introduction to the power of mathematics - fluent, friendly and practical'
- Tim Harford, bestselling author of How to Make the World Add Up

In our hyper-modern world, we are bombarded with more facts, stats and information than ever before. So, what can we grasp hold of to make sense of it all?

Oliver Johnson reveals how mathematical thinking can help us understand the myriad data all around us. From the exponential growth of viruses to social media filter-bubbles; from share-price fluctuations to growth of computing power; from the datafication of our sports pages to quantifying climate change. Not to mention the things much closer to home: ever wondered when the best time is to leave a party? What are the chances of rain ruining your barbecue this weekend? How about which queue is the best to join in the supermarket?

Journeying through the three sections of Randomness, Structure, and Information, we meet a host of brilliant minds such Alan Turing, Enrico Fermi and Claude Shannon, and we learn the tools, tips and tricks to cut through the noise all around us - from the Law of Large Numbers to Entropy to Brownian Motion.

Lucid, surprising, and endlessly entertaining, Numbercrunch equips you with a definitive mathematician's toolkit to make sense of your world.

Critics Review

  • The perfect introduction to the power of mathematics – fluent, friendly and practical.

    Tim Harford, author of 'How to Make the World Add Up'

  • A clear, straightforward, informative guide to understanding numbers. I wish I’d read it years ago.

    Tom Chivers, author of 'How to Read Numbers'

  • An excellent, straightforward introduction to usefulness of numbers, which gets to the heart of why maths is so important to all of us.

    David Sumpter, author of 'The Ten Equations that Rule the World'

  • A fine and valuable read. Johnson applies careful analysis and great common sense to an extraordinary range of applications of mathematical ideas, from football to filter bubbles – explaining formal ideas with minimum technicalities, and weighing their relevance to the real world.

    David Spiegelhalter, author of 'The Art of Statistics'

  • Lucid and entertaining. With barely an equation in sight, Numbercrunch makes a passionate case for how just a little bit more numeracy could help us all.

    Tom Whipple, Science Editor, 'The Times'

  • Numbers don’t lie but they often speak a foreign language. Professor Oliver Johnson is a superb maths-whisperer on a mission to arm his readers with the tools to distinguish sound claims from the many phoney ones that bombard us every day. Numbercrunch is an invaluable addition to the modern baloney-detection kit.

    Ananyo Bhattacharya, author of 'The Man from the Future'

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