Q&A In 'How Not to Be Wrong' Jordan Ellenberg makes math meaningful

June 18, 2014, 10:45 AM
By Carolyn Kellogg

In "How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking," Jordan Ellenberg writes about when it's a good idea to buy lottery tickets, why tall parents have shorter children, a dead fish in an MRI machine, and overperforming mutual funds. Because he's a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin, these come with handwritten graphs and equations, but his explanations are cultural, his references literary. Ellenberg is a contributor to Slate, and his book debuted on the extended bestseller list at the New York Times last week. He's currently on book tour and answered our questions by email.

It seems like the kind of math you practice at the University of Wisconsin (non-abelian Iwasawa theory! Galois representations!) is very different from the relatively accessible concepts you explain in “How Not to Be Wrong.” I’ve been trying to think of a metaphor – an opera singer teaching nursery rhymes? How do you think of the project of explaining math to non-math-heads?.

It would be a different world if there were a commercial market for non-abelian Iwasawa theory! But it’s not quite like teaching nursery rhymes; maybe more like a composer teaching the basic idea of the scale and of chords. The ideas I talk about in the book — like linearity, expected value, correlation, formalism — are not “baby” ideas, they’re really deep ideas that people worked very hard to create. But at the same time, they’re ideas that, once they’ve been developed and articulated, can be explained quite simply.

Did you have an ideal reader in mind when you were writing, or early readers of the manuscript?

http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-jordan-ellenberg-how-not-to-be-wrong-20140617-story.html#page=1