Do Dice Play God?: The Mathematics of Uncertainty

Gift purchase.

Chaos theory changed the world, and those who ignore chaos theory do so at their own peril. Do Dice Play God introduces chaos theory from a mathematical and narrative perspective and looks how the world is ruled by chaos if not randomness outright. Great for forecasters of all sorts. Interesting branch of applied mathematics.

No ones explains math concepts so clearly.

It's a good book with Stewart's usual gift for clarifying heady concepts. For what it's worth, though, it didn't feel quite as engaging to me as several other introductory texts (like "The Drunkard's Walk," I believe it's called) or even some of Stewart's own past works. His metaphors tend to work, but some of the concepts are so complicated they just fail to connect with the lay man. On average (you're welcome), a good read.

In this book, the author, a mathematician and well-known popularizer of science and mathematics, explores the subject of uncertainty in a variety of domains. These include the usual probability distributions, coin flips and dice throws as well as various fallacies and paradoxes. But also included are fascinating discussions on thermodynamics, chaos theory, weather forecasting, climate change, Bayes’s Theorem, quantum uncertainty and many more topics involving uncertainty.I found this book very interesting. I particularly enjoyed the section on climate change; I found it quite informative and well done. The author’s prose, I thought, was generally clear, authoritative, often even riveting and quite engaging. I do admit that some passages were a bit tough going for me and required more than one reading. However, the wealth of information contained in this book makes reading it immensely enriching. I suspect that serious science enthusiasts will likely be the ones who will enjoy it the most.

Worth the price just to read the brief discussion of the famous Monty Hall problem. His analysis hinges on the conditions under which Monty Hall allows contestants to choose again. Always? Always when your first guess was wrong, and so on. A good companion piece, I think, for anyone who enjoyed the Scott Adams book about thinking skills offered by various disciplines but useful to us all in avoiding what he calls Loserthink. Journalism has more or less given up reporting what actually happened and has shifted to analysis of what might happen, we have all entered into a world of conditional information theory. What we read is increasingly subject to sampling error.

This is the book that I was very eager to read because of the subject: the mathematics of uncertainty. I read it in parallel with The Art of Statistics by David Spiegelhalter because I felt the combination of the two books on similar topics from two different directions would make the reading experience more complete as the two books should complement one another. It was mentally challenging to read both books together, but I am glad I did because my goal was accomplished: they were indeed complementary. There were certain areas where the books overlapped but it was good retrieval practice to go over some of those areas at spaced intervals.The book comprises of 18 chapters. The first two chapters sets the tone for Stewart. By defining the six ages of uncertainty in Chapter One, Stewart proceeds to converse about some of the things that humankind has been using to deal with uncertainty and to predict the future. He follows that initial setting of the stage with a qualitative discussion of the idea of probability and statistics. It is a difficult task because it is easier to discuss probability and statistics in terms of the equations. Even with that caveat, Stewart did an excellent job of explaining quantitative concepts qualitatively, it takes someone who deeply understands the ideas, in all their glory, to be able to pull it off, and Stewart did so. This is not to say that the book is completely devoid of numbers and figures, but it was enlightening to be reading about these concepts without equations and mathematics.The book then proceeds into many topics about uncertainty and randomness. He shares an abundance of examples and evidence which demonstrates the idea. It sometimes feel like an unrelenting onslaught of different cases in different areas, regarding different problems. The examples come from mathematics, biology, medicine, physics, numerical systems, and many more, which gives proper perspective to the reader as well elicits an understanding about the universality of uncertainty in our reality. The main topics that I had struggles with, and that is true of Spiegelhalter's book as well, is the section on the Bayesian probability, even though Stewart did a masterful job of explaining it. I understand Baysian ideas after having read both but I am still easily confused when trying to apply the idea.Stewart lost me with his explanation of quantum mechanics and the counter intuitive ideas from quantum mechanics. It was a difficult section to read, even though I was exposed to the idea when I was a young engineering student. On the other hand, when Stewart expounded on the ideas of dynamical systems, he made perfect sense, as I was thinking about Lorenz attractors when I was studying dynamical systems as a graduate student. Since I had understood those equations as equations, it was not much of a leap for me to understand them as applications which made the mathematics more sensible.As the reader work their way through the book, they will find themselves doing many mental gymnastics with the mathematics that he does present, but he does an excellent job of explaining why these concepts are so important to us.The last chapter is the magnum opus chapter that Professor Stewart uses as his platform to summarize his intention with the book. His key intent is to make the general audience become aware and comfortable with the fact that uncertainty is a normal part of life. Professor Stewart has work diligently throughout the book to chip away at our enduring and grossly erroneous belief that our lives are deterministic, and that any uncertainty that we admit or accept is not something that we overcome easily or can be disregarded because the uncertainty plays a very large role in how our lives will often result.A quick summary of all the topics that that had been discussed ends the book. In returning to these topics while reading these short pages, the reader realizes the extensive number of topics that Professor Stewart had discussed; more importantly, the reader finally understands the lessons that Professor Stewart is trying to teach us. He started with the basic ideas of how human beings dealt with uncertainty. As humanity progressed along the timeline, we got better at rationalizing some of the uncertainties, and we thought we were able to minimize the uncertainties. We invented tools like statistics and probability; we deliberately tested and experimented to arrive at what we thought was the truth. Even though this book is not the definitive history of uncertainty in our world, this book does very well in filling some of the obvious gaps in our thinking and dispels enough biases to make the readers at least accept the fact that life itself is uncertain and full of mystery.I thought the book was a marvelous read even though it was particularly challenging. Professor Stewart explained many different concepts very well, some better than others, but the overall effect is that the reader can gain a much better understanding of how little and how much we know about our world and appreciate how much guessing we are doing on a daily basis.

Uncertainty-- and the desire to navigate it-- drives all our lives. It effects health, wealth, weather, the criminal justice system, and, of course, the future. Ian Stewart is a superb guide through the most important concepts in how risk is managed. This is a book that everyone could profit from reading.

Good 👍 product

In this book, the author, a mathematician and well-known popularizer of science and mathematics, explores the subject of uncertainty in a variety of domains. These include the usual probability distributions, coin flips and dice throws as well as various fallacies and paradoxes. But also included are fascinating discussions on thermodynamics, chaos theory, weather forecasting, climate change, Bayes’s Theorem, quantum uncertainty and many more topics involving uncertainty.I found this book very interesting. I particularly enjoyed the section on climate change; I found it quite informative and well done. The author’s prose, I thought, was generally clear, authoritative, often even riveting and quite engaging. I do admit that some passages were a bit tough going for me and required more than one reading. However, the wealth of information contained in this book makes reading it immensely enriching. I suspect that serious science enthusiasts will likely be the ones who will enjoy it the most.

Nice

I read Prof Stewart's 'Does God play dice?' several years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it, therefore I was really looking forward to the follow-up.I'll have to admit that I struggled with this book, which is far more a criticism of my rusty maths and stats skills than of the book itself. I'm going to read it again to see if I can grasp a bit more from the many sections I didn't fully understand.As one other reviewer has rightly pointed out, you'll need at least an undergraduate level of maths to get the most out of this book.This would've been a 5-star review but for a couple of gripes. First is the author's lapse into soap-boxing about man-made climate change. Whatever your views on the degree to which man-made CO2 may be affecting the climate, I found the preachy tone out of place in a book like this. Secondly, the chapter on securities pricing is very misleading in that it starts by looking at the random walk theory of equity pricing and then jumps without warning to talking about option pricing and the hazards of assuming that risk is normally distributed. There's big gap between option pricing models that don't use a normally distributed measure of implied volatility (there are plenty of variants on Black-Scholes that don't make this assumption), and the monster that is the Cauchy distribution - the latter is where black swans, blind archers and other statistical chimera make their nests. This chapter also doesn't make it clear that cash equities, bonds (credit instruments and government securities) and derivatives such as CDOs, CDSs and vanilla exchange-traded options all have very different risk and pricing models.

Interesting stuff, but a difficult read. Also nothing really new; must of the stuff I had read in other books. Not worth the effort.