Do Dice Play God?: The Mathematics of Uncertainty by Professor Ian Stewart

£20.00

Available – Ready for despatch or collection within 5 - 7 days

ISBN: 9781781259436 Category: Tags: ,

Description

Uncertainty is everywhere. It lurks in every consideration of the future – the weather the economy the sex of an unborn child – even quantities we think that we know such as populations or the transit of the planets contain the possibility of error. It’s no wonder that throughout that history we have attempted to produce rigidly defined areas of uncertainty – we prefer the surprise party to the surprise asteroid. We began our quest to make certain an uncertain world by reading omens in livers tea leaves and the stars. However over the centuries driven by curiosity competition and a desire be better gamblers pioneering mathematicians and scientists began to reduce wild uncertainties to tame distributions of probability and statistical inferences. But even as unknown unknowns became known unknowns our pessimism made us believe that some problems were unsolvable and our intuition misled us. Worse as we realized how omnipresent and varied uncertainty is we encountered chaos quantum mechanics and the limitations of our predictive power. Bestselling author Professor Ian Stewart explores the history and mathematics of uncertainty. Touching on gambling probability statistics financial and weather forecasts censuses medical studies chaos quantum physics and climate he makes one thing clear: a reasonable probability is the only certainty.

Additional information

Weight 599 g
Dimensions 240 × 162 × 29 mm
Cover

Hardback