Chance: A Guide to Gambling, Love, the Stock Market and Just About Everything Else [Hardcover]

Amir D. Aczel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 2004

Chance defines our life. Will you get the job, the lover, and the money? Now Amir Aczel, in this slim book modeled on his very successful Fermat's Last Theorem, gives readers the tools to minimize, or maximize, chance's effect on their lives. Chance marks Aczel's return to his preferred field: the popularization of mathematics. Here, Aczel explores probability theory and its daily, practical applications, while along the way relating stories of inveterate gamblers who also happen to be mathematical geniuses. With the clarity of the statistician he once was, Aczel analyzes what is commonly known as luck. Alongside chapters on "The Surprising Birthday Problem," "Coincidences," and "How to Make Great Decisions" are a history of probability theory and anecdotes of its daily applications.

Editorial Reviews

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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

People, as a rule, perform poorly when it comes to estimating risk and chance. Casinos profit from this ignorance about probability, and statistics in the news tend not to be well understood by the public. Aczel takes on the noble mission of enlightening readers with the theory behind everyday probability, indulging in amusing whimsies along the way. If you wish to get married, for example, Aczel advises you to reject the first 37 percent of your dating pool, after which you propose to the first date you like. He shows why one should not marvel that in a random collection of 20 people, it's likely 2 will have the same birthday. In these examples as well as others drawn from worlds ruled by chance, such as cards and the stock market, Aczel describes the nature of randomness with simple formulas, showing the results of random trials, such as coin tosses. Extending his winning track record of popularizing science (e.g., Pendulum, 2003), Aczel entertains readers with ways to tame the guesswork. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 161 pages
• Publisher: Thunder's Mouth Press (2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568583168
• ISBN-13: 978-1568583167
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,324,952 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Amir D. Aczel, Ph.D., is the author of 17 books on mathematics and science, some of which have been international bestsellers. Aczel has taught mathematics, statistics, and history of science at various universities, and was a visiting scholar at Harvard in 2005-2007. In 2004, Aczel was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is also the recipient of several teaching awards, and a grant from the American Institute of Physics to support the writing of two of his books. Aczel is currently a research fellow in the history of science at Boston University. The photo shows Amir D. Aczel inside the CMS detector of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the international laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, while there to research his new book, "Present at the Creation: The Story of CERN and the Large Hadron Collider"--which is about the search for the mysterious Higgs boson, the so-called "God particle," dark matter, dark energy, the mystery of antimatter, Supersymmetry, and hidden dimensions of spacetime.
See Amir D. Aczel's webpage: http://amirdaczel.com
Video on CERN and the Large Hadron Collider: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ncx8TE2JMo

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Leaving it all to chance, November 28, 2004

By 

R. Yolken (Baltimore Md) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Chance: A Guide to Gambling, Love, the Stock Market and Just About Everything Else (Hardcover)

"Chance" by Amir Aczel is an entertaining introduction to statistical reasoning as applied to daily life. It will provide a great deal of information to those unfamiliar with statistics or statistical reasoning. However, because of the brevity of the explanations, the reader often does not have adequate information to evaluate the hypotheses put forward in the text. This is particularly the case in the section on selecting a mate, in which a number is given based on "e" without any real explanation, and the section on Bayes's theorem, which does not provide enough detail to allow for adequate understanding or evaluation. The book also has some factual errors, such as the presentation of a poker hand in which one player is trying to draw to a flush in order to "beat" another player who already has a full house. I also think that some of the problems presented at the end of the book were not explained clearly.

This book may be a good place to start for someone interested in the application of statistics to daily life but it will leave the interested reader thirsting for more details and explanation. If that was the goal of the author, he certainly succeeded. Perhaps he or other authors will write a book which addresses this need in the near future.

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Great idea, but needed a lot more work, January 9, 2005

By 

William J. Brinkman II (Oxford, OH USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Chance: A Guide to Gambling, Love, the Stock Market and Just About Everything Else (Hardcover)

In "Chance," Dr. Aczel had a wonderful idea: Present the basic ideas of probability in a context that lay-people can understand. He engages the reader's imagination through real-life examples. Given the role that probability and statistics play in political reporting (through polls), the recent poker craze and investing, this book seems an ideal gift for just about anyone who doesn't already know anything about probability theory.

Unfortunately, the execution of the book is severely flawed. The book is very poorly edited. In particular, many of the formulas contain significant errors. A probability theory novice will certainly get lost in this.

In addition, in the section about 6 degrees of separation, he makes no mention of James Milgram's experiment. One can probably safely assume he is aware of this experiment, and I think that making no mention of it (especially as it brings sociology so nicely into the picture) was a mistake.

Finally, the book is simply too short. The real text is only about 120 pages, with a large font and small pages. I was originally considering giving this book to my Computer Algorithms students as a helpful introduction to probability. Dr. Aczel does not, however, provide enough formulas and examples to make this useful.

I highly recommend this book as a gift for those people who have never had a probability course. It will help acquaint them with some of the counter-intuitive effects that probability theory has on every-day life. Serious fans of math, however, should steer clear.

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Book needs editing., December 3, 2004

By 

Robert Bollinger - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Chance: A Guide to Gambling, Love, the Stock Market and Just About Everything Else (Hardcover)

The basic ideas are clearly and cleverly presented. However, it is little more than a very short text with a few examples. It is distracting to find the equations clumsily presented, and there are errors of content in addition to typos. It needed a knowledgable and diligent editor.