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What are the Chances of That? discusses chance and the importance of understanding how it affects our lives. It goes beyond a mathematical approach to the subject, showing how our thinking about chance and uncertainty has been shaped by history and culture, and only relatively recently by the mathematical theory of probability.
List of contents
- Pure Chance
- 1: The Roll of the Dice
- 2: Reckoning the Chances
- 3: Random Thoughts
- 4: Patterns of Probability
- Life Chances
- 5: Isn't that a coincidence?
- 6: What Luck!
- 7: Taking a Gamble
- 8: Danger of Death
- 9: What's There to Worry About?
- Happy Accidents
- 10: Chance Discoveries
- 11: Mixing it Up
- 12: A Chance to Live
- 13: Random Technology
- Taking Charge of Chance
- 14: The Weight of Evidence
- 15: Clarity from Chaos
- 16: Sharing the Risk
- 17: Shaping the Risk
- 18: What's Coming Next
- 19: Last Chance
- See Also
- Acknowledgements
About the author
Andrew Elliott cares about numbers and how people think about them. Coming from a career in financial systems, he understands the importance of fluent thinking about the impact of numbers in our lives. In 2016, unsettled by the lack of practical numeracy in public debate and in the media, he created a website and wrote the book Is That a Big Number? to help readers answer that question. His next book What are the Chances of That? continues that project by looking at some typically small numbers and probabilities.
Summary
What are the Chances of That? discusses chance and the importance of understanding how it affects our lives. It goes beyond a mathematical approach to the subject, showing how our thinking about chance and uncertainty has been shaped by history and culture, and only relatively recently by the mathematical theory of probability.
