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What are the chances? This is the question we ask ourselves when we encounter the strangest and most seemingly impossible coincidences, like the woman who won the lottery four times or the fact that Lincoln's dreams foreshadowed his own assassination. But, when we look at coincidences mathematically, the odds are a lot better than any of us would have thought.
In Fluke, mathematician Joseph Mazur takes a second look at the seemingly improbable, sharing with us an entertaining guide to the most surprising moments in our lives. He takes us on a tour of the mathematical concepts of probability, such as the law of large numbers and the birthday paradox, and combines these concepts with lively anecdotes of flukes from around the world. How do you explain finding your college copy of Moby Dick in a used bookstore on the Seine on your first visit to Paris? How can a jury be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that DNA found at the scene of a heinous crime did not get there by some fluke? Should we be surprised if strangers named Maria and Francisco, seeking each other in a hotel lobby, accidentally meet the wrong Francisco and the wrong Maria, another pair of strangers also looking for each other? As Mazur reveals, if there is any likelihood that something could happen, no matter how small, it is bound to happen to someone at some time.
In Fluke, Mazur offers us proof of the inevitability of the sublime and the unexpected. He has written a book that will appeal to anyone who has ever wondered how all of the tiny decisions that happen in our lives add up to improbable wholes. A must-read for math enthusiasts and storytellers alike, Fluke helps us to understand the true nature of chance.
- Sales Rank: #363826 in Books
- Brand: Joseph Mazur
- Published on: 2016-03-29
- Released on: 2016-03-29
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x 1.00" w x 5.88" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 288 pages
- Fluke The Math and Myth of Coincidence
Review
Advance Praise for Fluke:
“Always entertaining and frequently insightful, Fluke is never less than thought-provoking.”
—Amir Alexander, Wall Street Journal
“Mazur gently dashes icy water on our sense of wonder, patiently doing the math to explain multiple lottery winners, ‘remarkable' accidental scientific discoveries and wrongheaded government policy.”
—Keith Blanchard, Wall Street Journal
“Mazur takes what could be difficult, abstruse subjects—probability and statistics—and makes them entertaining. The author draws examples and illustrations from a variety of fields—law enforcement, economics, the sciences—and, when he unavoidably gets into some fairly complicated mathematical discussions, he explains his terms and remembers that, for the most part, his readers aren't mathematicians. An ideal book, then, for the lay reader who is curious about the nature of coincidence.”
—Booklist Online
“Well written, entertaining… an understandable introduction to probability for the layman.”
—MAA.org
“Mazur's thoughtful tour reveals the explanatory power of probability theory in the larger world.”
—Publishers Weekly
“In Fluke, the author takes us on a marvelous guided tour of the world of the unlikely and the improbable. After reading Fluke, you will definitely come away with a deeper understanding of why wildly improbable coincidences may not be so improbable after all.”
—Ronald Graham, Chief Scientist at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology
“A tour de force of masterful writing that weaves together simple and not-so-simple mathematical notions of probability and statistics into various intriguing coincidences from fact and fiction, explaining with nuance various strange phenomena. Mazur's book will teach you some of this mathematics, leaving you quite equipped to understand the role of chance in your life without resorting to magical thinking”
—Gizem Karaali, Editor, Journal of Humanistic Mathematics
“The chances are very slim that you'd ever read this blurb. A simple-minded calculation puts the odds at about 50,000 to one against. Yet... here you are. How weird is this seemingly far-fetched coincidence? Well, dear reader, you've picked up the right book to answer that question."
—Charles Seife, author of Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea
“With charm and clarity, Joe Mazur leads us through the strange terrain of chance and surprise. He explains why apparently remarkable coincidences are usually more likely than we imagine, because we underestimate how large our world really is. Not so much probability theory, as improbability theory! A terrific read, and a welcome antidote to superstition and gullibility.”
—Ian Stewart, author of Professor Stewart's Incredible Numbers
"Mazur has written a wonderfully insightful book. He shows how it is that our purely psychological expectations about what might happen in the real world, and our culturally acquired notions of order and disorder, often give us a completely false sense of the chance that something will, in fact, occur in the world outside."
—Richard Lewontin, Professor of Biology Emeritus at Harvard University and Author of The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change
“Clear, humorous, and grounded in history and culture, Fluke shows you why anything that can happen is bound to happen, sometime. But just as rainbows still thrill us when we parsed the physics, dissecting bizarre coincidences doesn't dilute our amazement. Mazur has accomplished the seemingly impossible feat of writing a book for everyone.”
—Marjorie Senechal, Editor-in-Chief, The Mathematical Intelligencer
About the Author
Joseph Mazur is an emeritus professor of mathematics at Marlboro College, and the author of four other popular mathematics books, the most recent of which is the highly acclaimed Enlightening Symbols: A Short History of Mathematical Notation and Its Hidden Powers. Among his many honors is a Guggenheim fellowship. Mazur lives with his wife, Jennifer, in Marlboro, Vermont.
Most helpful customer reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Parts of it are interesting
By David J. Aldous
The “math and myth" subtitle is intriguing, but the book is somewhat disappointing. One part discusses the basic math of probability theory, and another part covers probability-related topics (DNA forensics, chance scientific discoveries, ESP experiments, stock markets), but all this has been discussed in many other "popular science" books. The "myth" part discusses Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and other fiction, but the author's point is unclear to me: we all know that fiction often relies on coincidences or other unlikely events.
What part is interesting to me? Well the standard rationalist explanation of coincidences is simply that there are gazillions of possible coincides that might happen, so even if each has only a 1-in-a-gazillion probability, then some will happen "purely by chance". This is explained at length in the book The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day by an academic statistician. However, such books rely on very simple "small universe of possibilities" models, such as the birthday paradox, which are quite different from what we perceive as remarkable coincidences in everyday life. To me, the interesting and novel part (about 50 small pages) of this book is the following. In chapter 2 the author devises 10 classes of coincidences -- for instance "chance meetings" -- and gives a true historical story to fit each class -- for instance "In Miami a woman got into a taxi, and recognized the driver as her taxi driver from Chicago on one occasion 3 years earlier". Then in chapter 10 he tries to estimate the probability of the coincidence in the story. This is what is actually needed to justify the rationalist explanation. So I applaud the attempt. But -- as the author acknowledges -- it is hard to do. In the story of the taxi driver, the chance (according to the author's data -- he gets the calculation wrong) is very roughly 1 in 2.5 million. But this is the chance “per event” where an event is (very roughly) “someone gets a taxi in some big city away from their big home city”. Now I’m not sure how often this event happens, but with more than 200,000 U.S. taxi drivers I guess the event happens several million times per week, in which case this coincidence will happen several times a month to some passenger. The key point, which the author fails to emphasize, is that one needs to think very carefully about all the other roughly similar coincidences which might have happened.
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
I have to wonder if some of the reviewers actually read the book.
By Ken Blakely
I have to wonder if some of the reviewers actually read the book. Fluke contains four distinct sections: One: describe a series of specific coincidences; Two: describe the basic math behind calculating probability; Three: deconstruct each of the coincidences in section One and attempt to calculate the actual probability of their occurrence, using the tools in section Two; and Four: a wildly disconnected set of meanderings that doesn't seem to add value anywhere. Sections One through Three would be good enough to stand on their own if it weren't that they contain an uncomfortable number of basic math errors and unsupported assumptions. Section Four seems to be there only to add volume. Professor Mazur is a startlingly competent teacher and mathematician, but Fluke makes me think he was short of cash and needed to pump out a volume to pay some bills.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Good explanation of the seemingly imporrible
By Kenneth Veit
Loved it, because I have had so many similar experiences during the years when I was traveling the world (e.g, running into a man in Singapore whom I had only met the previous week in Chile).
As an actuary, I used similar methods to Mazur's to determine that for frequent international travelers the probability of such "Oh my God!" encounters was 50% per year.
My most bizarre occurrence was when I mistakenly took someone else's limousine at JFK (the driver was holding a sign with my last name on it) and then met the man a year later on the same London-NY flight. Given our unusual last names, it seemed incredible.
What makes Mazur's book so enjoyable is that he explains the math involved in an easily accessible way, so that the reader can get a feel for just how improbable (or not) some of these occurrences actually are.
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