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.
Les mer
The Mathematics of Uncertainty
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781782834014
Publisert
2019
Utgiver
Profile Books
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter