eon

Posted by tpc at August 9th, 2005

This is the third Paulos book that I’ve read, after A Mathematican Plays the Stock Market and A Mathematician Reads the Newspapers. (I’d rather forget that I tried to read Mathematics and Humor.)

It is a good book and Paulos has some good points which the general public would benefit from, although from time to time, the arguments get repeated. Let’s hope that he is not running out of good ideas but trying to drill them into the reader’s mind. I’m quoting two brilliant snippets from this book:

Fliess (inventor of biorhytmic analysis) pointed out to Freud that 23 and 28, the periods for some metaphysical male and female principles respectively, had the special property that if you add and subtract appropriate multiples of them, you can attain any number … Freud was so impressed with this that for years he was an ardent believer in biorhythms and thought that he would die at the age of fifty-one, the sum of 28 and 23.

Astrology maintains that the gravitational attraction of the planets at the time of one’s birth somehow has an effect on one’s personality … the gravitational pull of the delivering obstetrician far outweighs that of the planet or planets involved … does this mean that fat obstetricians deliver babies that have one set of personal characteristics, and skinny ones deliver babies that have quite different characteristics?

By the way, he will be in campus this Friday and I’m looking forward to the talk. Meanwhile, I’ll mention two personal examples.

1. I was at the library searching for a paper which was in vol 4 of a quarterly journal that was published in 95. But the funny thing was that the library only had vol 1-3 for 1995, but had vol 1-4 for the other years. Perhaps that volume was lost. Now what are the odds of such bad luck that the one volume which I wanted is also the volume that is missing from the collection? Well, it could jolly well be that there are many other missing volumes in the collection that we do not know of, simply because we were not consciously searching for it!

2. Locals like to use “Tonight, I’ll go buy lottery” as a wisecrack when they see something improbable happening. For example, if the laziest person started to do household chore voluntarily. But if you think about it, the fact that an improbable event happened does not really change the odds of winning the lottery.