Customer Reviews

The Broken Dice, and Other Mathematical Tales of Chance

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If you had to go through it in graduate school you'd probably agree with me that behaviour under uncertainty is usually handled rather mechanically by professors. You may even have considered that, anyway, not much intuition could be behind those theories. Ivar Ekeland shows in this book that dealing with the fundamentals of expectations, probabilities, games, and risk can be fun, and you get the intuition to start thinking by yourself as well. Early morning reading, though.

Ivar Ekeland is one of the better writers of popular mathematics. In "The Broken Dice," he continues with the themes explored in "Mathematics and the Unexpected." Divided into six chapters (Chance, Fate, Anticipation, Chaos, Risk and Statistics) the book is an elegant examination of the human struggle to find order in the seeming contingency that is the natural world. Mixed with the mathematical discussions are excerpts from Icelandic sagas, the Bible, and Shakespeare that reinforce the message that our analytical search for meaning is still fundamentally a humanistic endeavor.

As an aficionado of Norse sagas, I was intrigued to find that a mathematician wrote a book on probability framed by Saint Olaf's saga. Six essays on popular science topics, with clear explanations and interestingly non-standard historical and literary detours. But the choice of math topics (random number generators vs true randomness vs Kolmogorov complexity; random strategies in game theory; chaos, attractors, fractals and ergodicity; risk aversion and underestimation of rare serious events) seems in 2008 very unimaginative, and despite its colorful background the book brings no new insight or individualistic perspective to the science.