The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives

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Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 5 de mai. de 2009 - 272 páginas
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the classroom to the courtroom and from financial markets to supermarkets, an intriguing and illuminating look at how randomness, chance, and probability affect our daily lives that will intrigue, awe, and inspire.

“Mlodinow writes in a breezy style, interspersing probabilistic mind-benders with portraits of theorists.... The result is a readable crash course in randomness.” —The New York Times Book Review

With the born storyteller's command of narrative and imaginative approach, Leonard Mlodinow vividly demonstrates how our lives are profoundly informed by chance and randomness and how everything from wine ratings and corporate success to school grades and political polls are less reliable than we believe.

By showing us the true nature of chance and revealing the psychological illusions that cause us to misjudge the world around us, Mlodinow gives us the tools we need to make more informed decisions. From the classroom to the courtroom and from financial markets to supermarkets, Mlodinow's intriguing and illuminating look at how randomness, chance, and probability affect our daily lives will intrigue, awe, and inspire.
 

Conteúdo

Peering through the Eyepiece of Randomness
3
The Laws of Truths and HalfTruths
21
Finding Your Way through a Space of Possibilities
41
Tracking the Pathways to Success
60
The Dueling Laws of Large and Small Numbers
81
False Positives and Positive Fallacies
104
Measurement and the Law of Errors
124
The Order in Chaos
146
Illusions of Patterns and Patterns of Illusion
169
The Drunkards Walk
192
Acknowledgments
221
Index
239
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Sobre o autor (2009)

Leonard Mlodinow received his doctorate in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, was an Alexander von Humboldt fellow at the Max Planck Institute, and now teaches about randomness to future scientists at Caltech. Along the way he also wrote for the television series MacGyver and Star Trek: The Next Generation. His previous books include Euclid's Window: The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace, Feynman's Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life, and, with Stephen Hawking, A Briefer History of Time. He lives in South Pasadena, California.

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