Chance: A Guide to Gambling, Love, the Stock Market, and Just About Everything Else - Softcover

Aczel, Amir D

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1560257946 ISBN 13: 9781560257943

Publisher: Basic Books, 2005

Synopsis

In Chance, celebrated mathematician Amir D. Aczel turns his sights on probability theory—the branch of mathematics that measures the likelihood of a random event. He explains probability in clear, layman's terms, and shows its practical applications. What is commonly called luck has mathematical roots and in Chance, you'll learn to increase your odds of success in everything from true love to the stock market. For thousands of years, the twin forces of chance and mischance have beguiled humanity like none other. Why does fortune smile on some people, and smirk on others? What is luck, and why does it so often visit the undeserving? How can we predict the random events happening around us? Even better, how can we manipulate them? In this delightful and lucid voyage through the realm of the random, Dr. Aczel once again makes higher mathematics intelligible to us.

About this title

About the Author:

Amir D. Aczel earned both his BA in mathematics and Master of Science degree from the University of Oregon. Among many other books, he is the author of Entanglement: The Greatest Mystery in Physics; The Mystery of the Aleph: Mathematics, the Kabbalah, and the Search for Infinity; and Fermat's Last Theorem: Unlocking the Secret of an Ancient Mathematical Problem, which was translated into fifteen languages. He is an internationnaly known mathematician and lives in Boston.

From Publishers Weekly:

The baffling, for some, subject of chance and luck is demystified in this sketchy but engaging treatise. Mathematician Aczel (Fermat's Last Theorem) includes some equations, but mostly sticks to grade-school arithmetic and a few easy story problems in explicating the mathematics of probability. He untangles a number of urgent conundrums, including why buses always seem to run late, why any group of 31 people will include two with the same birthday and why random walks can model the stock market. The book abounds in counterintuitive life lessons. You shouldn't gamble, he says, but if you do then you are better off, probability-wise, if you blow your whole wad on a single spin of the roulette wheel than if you parcel it out in smaller bets. And the lovelorn can take comfort in knowing that, if you just keep dating, the odds are surprisingly good that your soul mate will turn up. Indeed, "[y]ou will maximize your probability of finding the best spouse if you date thirty-seven percent of the available candidates in your life, and then choose to stay with the next candidate who is better than all previous ones." Aczel's treatments of some topics, like game theory, are so perfunctory as to barely register, but his light touch generally makes probability come alive.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1560257946
• ISBN 13: 9781560257943
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176