What the Numbers Say by Derrick Niederman and David Boyum, Broadway Books/Random House, $24.95, ISBN 0767909984 Reviewed by Robert Matthews
WHAT would you rather be able to do: solve quadratic equations, or know how to make good decisions? No contest really, yet for years we’ve been trained to parrot the formula for quadratics while being left clueless about, say, how to react to some new alleged health threat.
The perils of not knowing how to cope in a world awash with numbers have been highlighted many times, most memorably by John Allen Paulos in his 1988 classic Innumeracy. More than…
