Customer Reviews

The Jungles of Randomness: A Mathematical Safari

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....not evvybody shares my love of mathematics, statistics, games and chance. People say folks like me are a strange lot, hence, I have been relunctant to put many mathematical and game related book reviews in my repertoire. This, however, is an exception to the rule..."math book = dry reading". It shows how probability and stats and random number generating can apply to evvyday living.

Before I go on, I have the urge to type these:

"Ah, but to all the other monkeys in the world, maybe the ape sitting at the keyboard DID recreate the Gutenberg Bible."

"When travelling in Europe, be wary of non-bottled potable water and, apparently, buy one get three free cheeseburgers."

There, I've gotten those off my chest. What do they have to do with this review? Well, Peterson here deals with odds--Odds and their contexts, like in coin flips and dice outcomes and hot hands for pro basketball players and random number generators on slot machines and such. The Chapters on Brownian Motion entitled "Trails of the Wanderer" and "Lifetimes of Chance" are great because he talks about the lottery and winning the lottery, how stocks in the stock market have some type of Brownian motion, magnets, dominoes, roulette wheels at casinos--you know all the interesting things a man ought to be attracted to, described in a punchy, easy to digest manner...

Each chapter is forwarded with a quote or poetry verse gleaned from classic literature, for example, the Chapter "Complete Chaos" has a part of a canto from Milton's "Paradise Lost".

Also the Color Plates show some awesome sights like the one depicting vibrations on the membrane shaped like a fractal snowflake and the visual representation of the output from a high speed random-number generator.

A few lay types may be put off by his mentioning of some musty mathematician or statistician here and there but, to his credit Peterson does not try to lay some indecipherable equation on the reader when he describes what said math or stat person is to his basic text. Or, in other words, no need for math anxiety unless you're generally anxious about a lot anyways...this ain't rocket science, people!

Well, actually, yes it could be, but you would not know it from the way Peterson has presented it in this fabulous read....

Consists of 2-3 page sections on topics (e.g. Chutes and Ladders as a Markov chain; Ramsey theory; coupled oscillators; error-correcting codes; Brownian motion and Levy flights) in probability and related areas of mathematics. The individual sections are clearly and interestingly explained by science journalist author who understands the mathematics. But compiling such magazine articles into a book gives it an overall choppy feel, jumping from topic to topic without sustained logical thread.

In this work of popular mathematics, Ivars Peterson explains the phenomena and regularity underlying seemingly random occurrences in our lives. Dry wit and keen understanding of mundane episodes provide an impressing dissection of how even the most chance events are in fact due to phenomena that, though easily understood, interact in such complex ways as to be beyond our comprehension--producing the supposedly "random" results we perceive.

As with many attempts to popularize science, this book is very light on theory and equations, instead explaining the practical significance of its subject. However, it does provide many names and enough theory to serve as a jumping point for further investigation into such areas as chaos, fractal geometry, information theory, and more.

I can't believe I'm the first to reviw this book! I have found the information and references in this book to be very good. In most cases Ivars Peterson is one of the best new science and mathematics writers that I know of! I'm interested in chaos and fractals, but mathematics also is in this book. There seems to be a little of everything. There is even work by Mandelbrot that I hadn't read about. I can only fault that he didn't put in enough of the equations and code to produce the examples. Also a glossary of terms would be helpful. But it is a very good buy in paperback!

This book was ok but I was a bit disappointed in its lack of material specifically devoted to the topic of the title's keyword, randomness. There were many interesting topics discussed but many seemed to be more about aesthetic attractiveness than actual randomness. For example, a lengthy analysis of drum heads and fractals didn't seem to be too related to randomness specifically. Maybe I just didn't understand the connection. The same lack of attention to randomness also annoyed me when he talked about protein folding and firefly synchronization. If protein folding were random, we'd all be piles of jelly. It's true that protein folding is very, very complicated, but that does not random make it. Towards the end he did get around to talking about randomness per se and spent some time talking about the quirks of the entire notion of randomness and how that relates to sources of randomness, pseudo and natural. That was what I was interested in. To have to go through a big book of stuff to get to that wasn't so good since, despite being interesting, it wasn't what I was interested in. If you want a book that randomly explores complex mathematical curiosities in an accessible way, this is a fine book. If you're really keen to know a lot about the current thinking of randomness, this book may not be a good use of your time.

Popular science books seem to be in vogue-- great for any legitimate scientists that sincerely want to get something across to "lay" people. But hacks gathering together a bunch of stuff to amaze us is worse than Ripley.

I wouldn't pass this book on to to a 4th grader.

Since you are interested in only raves, I am sure that this missile will quietly disappear