Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences.

by John Allen Paulos. Vintage Books, 1990. 180pp. $23.95

(Reviewed by Bernard Howard)

"Math was always my worst subject" "I can't even balance my checkbook." "I'm a people person, not a numbers person." With these and similar quotations from people apparently proud of their weakness, Paulos starts his book, written out of anger and frustration.

Readers will note from the quotations that the book is American, but the message is for all. The message is that to be innumerate is to be intellectually crippled. It lays one open to pseudoscientific deceptions, both by others and by ones-self. One can become obsessed by "amazing" coincidences, which Paulos shows are not amazing at all, but statistically inevitable. Innumeracy also misleads people into grossly inaccurate assessment of risk. Paulos tells how in 1985 Americans travelling abroad had a 1 in 1.6 million chance of being killed by a terrorist. This drove many thousands of them to stay at home, where 1 in 5,300 Americans died in car crashes. ESP, predictive dreams, astrology, UFO visitors, medical quackery and numerology, and more, come under Paulos's scrutiny, and are found mathematically deficient.

His conclusion, that the harmful effects of innumeracy result from inadequate mathematics teaching, has a lesson for us in New Zealand. This book is written in a bright, engaging manner, with a minimum of mathematics used to drive home the message. Numerate skeptics will find ammunition here useful in argument; innumerate skeptics, if such there be, will find their intellectual position greatly strengthened by reading it.