How Math Can Save Your Life

James D. Stein

Description

How to make lots of money, keep yourself safe, and even save the world-all by using a little simple math

Forget the dull, boring math you learned in school. This book shows you the powerful things math can do for you, with applications no teacher ever taught you in algebra class. How can you make money off credit card companies? Will driving a hybrid save you money in the long run? How do you know when he or she is "the one"?

From financial decisions to your education, job, health, and love life, you'll learn how the math you already know can help you get a lot more out of life.

• Gives you fun, practical advice for using math to improve virtually every area of daily life
• Includes straightforward explanations and easy-to-follow examples
• Written by the author of the successful guide, How Math Explains the World

Filled with practical, indispensable guidance you can put to work every day, this book will safeguard your wallet and enrich every aspect of your life. You can count on it!
Preface.

Introduction: What Math Can Do for You.

1 The Most Valuable Chapter You Will Ever Read.

Are service contracts for electronics and appliances just a scam?

How likely are you to win at roulette?

Is it worth going to college?

2 How Math Can Help You Understand Sports Strategy.

Why could Bart Simpson probably beat you at rock, paper, scissors?

What are "pure" and "mixed" strategies?

Is a pass play or a run play more likely to make a first down?

3 How Math Can Help Your Love Life.

How do you know when he or she is "the one"?

Whom should you ask to the senior prom?

Why are women reputed to be fickle while men are steadfast?

4 How Math Can Help You Beat the Bookies.

Why should your lottery ticket contain numbers greater than 31?

Can you overcome a negative expectation?

When should you bluff and when should you fold?

5 How Math Can Improve Your Grades.

Will guessing on a multiple-choice test get you a better score?

What test subject should you spend the most time studying for?

What subject should you major in?

6 How Math Can Extend Your Life Expectancy.

How dangerous is it to speed?

Why might your prescription show the wrong dosage?

Should you have a risky surgery or not?

7 How Math Can Help You Win Arguments.

Was the bailout the only way to save the banks?

Do you really have logic on your side?

What are the first arithmetic tables learned by children on Spock's home planet?

8 How Math Can Make You Rich.

How can you actually make money off credit card companies?

Will refinancing your house actually save money?

Is a hybrid car a better value?

9 How Math Can Help You Crunch the Numbers.

How did statistics help prevent cholera in nineteenth-century London?

Why won't Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf’s son be a tennis prodigy?

Are you more likely to meet someone over 7 feet tall or someone more than 100 years old?

10 How Math Can Fix the Economy.

What is the "Tulip Index"?

What doesn't the mortgage banking industry understand about negative numbers?

What caused the stock market crash of 1929?

11 Arithmetic for the Next Generation.

How can you get your kids interested in math?

What is the purpose of arithmetic?

How does Monopoly money make learning division easier?

12 How Math Can Help Avert Disasters.

What caused the Challenger space shuttle crash?

How could we have prevented much of the damage from Hurricane Katrina?

How can you determine the possible cost of a disaster?

13 How Math Can Improve Society.

How much is a human life worth in dollars?

When should legal cases be settled out of court?

At what point does military spending become unnecessary?

14 How Math Can Save the World.

Do extraterrestrial aliens exist?

How can we prevent nuclear war and a major asteroid impact?

When is the world going to end?

Notes.

Index.

Sujets

• Sciences et techniques
• Freakonomics
• Mathematics
• Steven Levitt

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 12 février 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780470569740
• Langue: English

Extrait

Table of Contents
 
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
PREFACE
Introduction
Salina, Kansas, 1895
 
Chapter 1 - The Most Valuable Chapter You Will Ever Read
 
Service Contracts: This Is Worth Thousands of Dollars
Risk-Reward Ratios and Playing the Percentages
Let’s Take a Break
Going to College: A Decision Worth Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars
One Long Season
 
Chapter 2 - How Math Can Help You Understand Sports Strategy
 
Rock, Paper, Scissors
Third and Six
First and Ten
How to Play 2 × 2 Games
Arrival Time
Valuable Cargo
 
Chapter 3 - How Math Can Help Your Love Life
 
How Do I Know If He (or She) Is “the One”?
One of Those Days
Prom Date
The Expected Value of Internet Dating
A Question of Percentages
 
Chapter 4 - How Math Can Help You Beat the Bookies
 
The Three Types of Games
Calculating the Bookie’s Edge
Can You Win at Betting Sports?
Calling a Bluff Using Game Theory
 
Chapter 5 - How Math Can Improve Your Grades
 
Strategies for Taking Tests
Strategies for Improving Your GPA
 
Chapter 6 - How Math Can Extend Your Life Expectancy
 
It’s Not Just a Number
Speed Really Does Kill
Percentages: The Most Misunderstood Topic in Mathematics
So Many Ways to Die
May You Never Have to Use This
 
Chapter 7 - How Math Can Help You Win Arguments
 
The $700 Billion Question
The Ultimate Trump Card
Symbolic Logic
When Is an Implication Valid?
Validating Arguments
Analyzing the $700 Billion Question
It Really Is Arithmetic
 
Chapter 8 - How Math Can Make You Rich
 
Financing: You’ve Just Got to Do the Math
Credit Cards: Their Utility and Some Associated Traps and Pitfalls
How Math Can Help You Buy a House
Should You Buy a Hybrid?
A Return Visit to Salina
 
Chapter 9 - How Math Can Help You Crunch the Numbers
 
Snow in the Time of Cholera
The Two Goals of Statistics
The Three M’s
Regression to the Mean
How Statistics Have Made Me Immortal
The Bell-Shaped Curve
What Does It Take to Convince You?
Hypothesis Testing
What Is the “Margin of Error”?
Why Statistics Get the Wrong Results More Often Than They Should
 
Chapter 10 - How Math Can Fix the Economy
 
Hey, They’re Just Tulips
Intrinsic Value
The Once-in-a-Century Credit Tsunami
Debt and Negative Numbers
The Fluctuating Fractions
The Math Lesson
The Crash of 1929
Arithmetic and Debt
The Tulip Index
 
Chapter 11 - Arithmetic for the Next Generation
 
Why Bother?
Start Them as Soon as Possible
The Single Most Important Fact about Arithmetic
The Second Most Important Fact about Arithmetic
Total Recall
Take It Away
Getting a Quarterback
Go Forth and Multiply
Divide and Conquer
Averages
Summarizing the Past, Predicting the Future
One Final Piece of Advice
 
Chapter 12 - How Math Can Help Avert Disasters
 
January 28, 1986
September 23, 1998
August 29, 2005
The Two Key Questions
How Math Can Help
A Tale of Two Cities
 
Chapter 13 - How Math Can Improve Society
 
The Firefighter and the Dog Food
Bureaucratic Depreciation and the Devaluation of Human Life
Bracket Creep and Fiscal Drag
 
Chapter 14 - How Math Can Save the World
 
The Tower of Hanoi
The Drake Equation
February 5, 1958
A Visit to the Yucatan Peninsula
99942 Apophis
 
NOTES
INDEX

Copyright © 2010 by James D. Stein. All rights reserved
 
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
 
Published simultaneously in Canada
 
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, [phone], fax [phone], or on the web at www.copyright.com . Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, [phone], fax [phone], or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions .
 
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and the author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
 
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Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. For more information about Wiley products, visit our web site at www.wiley.com .
 
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Stein, James D., date.
How math can save your life / James D. Stein. p. cm.
Includes index.
eISBN : 978-0-470-56974-0
1. Mathematics—Miscellanea. I. Title.
QA99.S735 2010
510—dc22
2009028776
 
For Maxine and James, my first arithmetic teachers
PREFACE
My performance in high school English courses was somewhat less than stellar, partly because I enjoyed reading science fiction a lot more than I liked to read Mark Twain or William Shakespeare. I always felt that science fiction was the most creative form of literature, and Isaac Asimov was one of its most imaginative authors.
He may not have rivaled Shakespeare in the characters or dialogue department, but he had ideas, and ideas are the heart and soul of science fiction. In 1958, the year I graduated from high school, Asimov’s story “The Feeling of Power” appeared in print for the first time. I read it a couple of years later when I was in college and coincidentally had a summer job as a computer programmer, working on a machine approximately the size of a refrigerator whose input and output consisted of punched paper tape.
Asimov’s story was set in a distant future, where everyone had pocket calculators that did all of the arithmetic, but nobody understood the rules and ideas on which arithmetic was based. We’re not quite there yet, but we’re approaching it at warp speed. As I got older, I noticed the decline in my students’ arithmetic abilities, but it came to a head a few years ago when a young woman came to my office to ask me a question. She was taking a course in what is euphemistically called College Algebra, which is really an amalgam of Algebra I and II as given in countless high schools. Several comments had led me to believe that the students in the class didn’t understand percentages, so I had given a short quiz—for the details, see chapter 6. As the young woman and I were reviewing the quiz in my office after the exam, we came to a problem that required the student to compute 10 percent of a number.
“Try to do it without the calculator,” I suggested.
She concentrated for a few seconds and became visibly upset. “I can’t,” she replied.
After that incident, I began to watch students in my class as they took tests. I deliberately design all of my tests so that a calculator is not needed; I’m testing how well the students can use the ideas presented in the course, not how well they can use a calculator. I can solve every single problem on every exam I give without even resorting to pencil-and-paper arithmetic, such as would generally be required to multiply two two-digit numbers or add up a column of figures. I noticed that the typical student was spending in the vicinity of 20 percent of the exam time punching numbers into a calculator. What the hell was going on?
What had happened was that the presence of calculators had caused arithmetical skills to atrophy, much as Asimov had predicted. More important, though, was something that Asimov touched on in his story but didn’t emphasize in the conclusion. Here are the last few lines of the story: “Nine times seven, thought Shuman with deep satisfaction, is sixty-three, and I don’t need a computer to tell me so. The computer is in my own head. And it was amazing the feeling of power that gave him.” 1
Almost all math teachers will tell you that the power of arithmetic is not the ability to multiply nine times seven, but the knowledge of the problems that could be solved by multiplication. Of course, that philosophy was behind the original rush to stick a calculator in the hands of every schoolchild as soon as he or she could push the buttons. Arithmetic had become the red-headed stepchild of mathematics education. The thought was that if we just got past the grunt work of tedious arithmetic, we could fast forward to the beauty and power of higher mathematics.
Unfortunately, we lost sight of the fact that there is a whole lot of beauty and power in arithmetic. Although most people can do arithmetic, few really understand and appreciate its scope. The feeling of power alluded to in the last line of Asimov’s story comes nowadays not with the ability to calculate, but with the ability to use the powerful and beautiful tool that is arithmetic. Arithmetic can greatly improve the quality—and the quantity—of your life. It can improve the organizations and the societies of which you ar