Numbercrunch: A Mathematician's Toolkit for Making Sense of Your World

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Numbercrunch: A Mathematician’s Toolkit for Making Sense of Your World by Professor Oliver Johnson – eBook Details Oliver Johnson is professor of information theory and director of the Institute for Statistical Science in the school of mathematics at Bristol University Professor Johnson said, "It is extremely hard to plan the most efficient route to visit a large collection of places—a challenge often referred to as the Traveling Salesman Problem. The largest case of this issue currently solved by humans had 85,900 places to visit, which took an extraordinary 136 years' worth of computing power. Professor Johnson explained: “While it may be powerless to sweeten the pill, maths can certainly help you understand what’s going on. For example, what are the chances that the last chocolate left in the box is a nasty one? It’s actually very simple: if our box has 24 nice chocolates and 6 nasty ones, there’s a simple way to see the likelihood of the last one being nasty is 6/30, or 20%. That’s the same chance that the first one is nasty, because you could imagine randomly pulling out all the chocolates and putting them in a long line – and then deciding which end of the line to start eating from.

Professor Johnson said: “Newton’s work in understanding the solutions of certain equations was developed by Colin Maclaurin, a child prodigy who became professor of mathematics at the age of 19. This led to what is known as Maclaurin’s inequality, which tells us that, among all the rectangular boxes with the same volume, the cube is the one with the smallest surface area. A clear, straightforward, informative guide to understanding numbers. I wish I'd read it years ago. What you'd like is a nice spread of baubles, without too many of the same color next to one another. It seems natural to try decorating the tree 'at random,' but this won't lead to a good effect. Suppose you have 100 baubles and 100 branches: if you just put each bauble on a randomly chosen branch, then more than a third (about 37%) of the branches will have no decorations at all, whereas some might well have as many as four baubles.Children are rightly amazed by Santa Claus’ incredible ability to travel fast enough to visit every house in the world in just one night. The vast distances and sheer volume of stops are so mind-boggling, they would stretch the most sophisticated supercomputer. So, if you want to save on wrapping paper, you should look for presents that are close to cubes—in shape that is, not sugar cubes though they might go down well with Santa's reindeer. That's another reason not to forget the Chocolate Orange—it should cost you less to wrap than a thin flat bar with the same amount of chocolate inside.

Oliver Johnson, Professor of Information Theory at the University of Bristol, helped explain the constant stream of statistics during the pandemic. He has also been busy writing his debut book "Numbercrunch," out next year with Heligo Books, which reveals how numerical thinking can help resolve some of life's biggest conundrums. However, the same problems of uncertainty and precision affect figures such as GDP growth, which are again based on sampling and estimation to some extent, and subject to later revision. It would be wise not to overweight the February news stories that the UK had narrowly avoided a recession by reporting zero GDP growth in the fourth quarter of 2022. The quoted figure of zero could as easily be plus or minus a few tenths of a per cent in reality, and feeding it into a binary classification “Are we in recession or not?” ignores that. Rather, it would be better to say that growth is essentially flat, and whether the technical definition of recession is satisfied makes little difference to most people’s everyday lives. Beware of exponential errorsAccording to the publisher, Numbercrunch equips readers with the mathematical tools and thinking to understand the myriad data all around us. So here are his top six numerical insights, shedding new light on the festive season and hopefully giving you some handy pointers on how to make them work to your advantage. While there is uncertainty about the potential for bird flu to infect humans, investing in new vaccines now could avoid the ruinous cost of another pandemic. Photograph: Ian Forsyth/Getty Images Oliver Johnson reveals how mathematical thinking can help us understand the myriad data all around us. By the same token, the 35 total presents I've received by Day 5 are made up as the 20 presents I'd received the day before, plus the 15 new presents arriving that day. That means, for those doing the math, by the twelfth day I will have received 364 presents in total. The presents I will have most of are the geese a-laying and swans a-swimming which first arrive on Days 6 and 7."

Professor Johnson said, "Even if you've grown out of advent calendars, it's impossible to escape the importance of numbers at Christmas. For instance, if you get the timings wrong on defrosting your turkey or miscount the number of places needed at the dinner table, it's likely to cause some serious festive frustration. But there are also some lesser-known and rather intriguing ways math can make your celebrations a little merrier." Children are rightly amazed by Santa Claus' incredible ability to travel fast enough to visit every house in the world in just one night. The vast distances and sheer volume of stops are so mind-boggling, they would stretch the most sophisticated supercomputer. Professor Johnson explained, "While it may be powerless to sweeten the pill, math can certainly help you understand what's going on. For example, what are the chances that the last chocolate left in the box is a nasty one? It's actually very simple: if our box has 24 nice chocolates and 6 nasty ones, there's a simple way to see the likelihood of the last one being nasty is 6/30, or 20%. That's the same chance that the first one is nasty, because you could imagine randomly pulling out all the chocolates and putting them in a long line—and then deciding which end of the line to start eating from.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. 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. 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' * Similarly, there will be bare patches, just by random chance. In the same way, placing different coloured baubles randomly will tend to lead to two or three baubles of the same colour close together more often than we’d like. That means in fact, the best way to decorate your tree might be using a so-called quasi-random strategy, which lies somewhere between the very random and very structured extremes, and can be more pleasing on the eye.” To whet your appetite for his wizardry, Professor Johnson has turned his mathematical mindset to the equally challenging problem of number crunching Christmas.