“How Not to Be Wrong”: What the literary world can learn from math by Laura Miller.
From the post:
Jordan Ellenberg’s “How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking” is a miscellaneous romp through the world of quantitative reasoning. You can tell just how modular the book is by the way bits of it have been popping up all over the Web of late, promising to explain such mysteries as why so many handsome men are jerks or why an athlete’s performance always seems to suffer a drop-off after he signs a big contract. This pull-apart quality may sound like a bug, but in fact it’s a feature. It makes “How Not to Be Wrong” a rewarding popular math book for just about anyone.
Ellenberg is a professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who spent “some part of my early 20s thinking I might want to be a Serious Literary Novelist.” (He even published a novel, “The Grasshopper King.”) He has a popular math column at Slate. So Ellenberg can write, and furthermore he brings a set of references to the subject that will make many a numbers-shy humanities major feel right at home. He explains why B.F. Skinner’s “proof” that Shakespeare was not particularly inclined toward poetic alliteration was incorrect, and he is as likely to refer to Robert Frost and Thomas Pynchon as to such mathematical titans as R.A. Fisher and Francis Galton. He takes the playful, gentle, humorous tone of a writer used to cajoling his readers into believing that they can understand what he’s talking about.
At the same time, those who like to pull out a pencil and a piece of paper and work through a few equations for the fun of it should not be utterly put off by the aforementioned cajoling. Interested in a brush-up on plane geometry, the implications of the Prime Numbers Theorem and Yitang Zhang’s recently announced proof of the “bounded gaps” conjecture about the distribution of primes? Pull up a chair. On the other hand, if any sentence containing the term “log N” makes you go cross-eyed and befuddled, you need only turn a few pages ahead to another chapter, where you can read about how two separate math cartels gamed the Massachusetts state lottery.
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Laura’s review will leave you convinced that “Have you read ‘How Not to be Wrong’ by Jordan Ellenberg?” should be on your technical interview checklist.
Or at least you should pull examples from it to use in your technical interviews.
Despite all the hype about “big data,” “web scale,” etc., the nature of coherent thinking has not changed. The sooner you winnow out candidates that thing otherwise the better.