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The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives (Vintage) |  | Author: Leonard Mlodinow
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
Buy New: $6.20
as of 7/31/2010 13:33 CDT details
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Rating:  151 reviews
Sales Rank: 4459
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Pages: 272
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.1 x 0.9
ISBN: 0307275175
Dewey Decimal Number: 519.2
EAN: 9780307275172
ASIN: 0307275175
Publication Date: May 5, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
Amazon Guest Review: Stephen Hawking
Published in 1988, Stephen Hawkings A Brief History of Time became perhaps one of the unlikeliest bestsellers in history: a not-so-dumbed-down exploration of physics and the universe that occupied the London Sunday Times bestseller list for 237 weeks. Later successes include 1995s A Briefer History of Time, The Universe in a Nutshell, and God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs that Changed History. Stephen Hawking is Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge.  In The Drunkards Walk Leonard Mlodinow provides readers with a wonderfully readable guide to how the mathematical laws of randomness affect our lives. With insight he shows how the hallmarks of chance are apparent in the course of events all around us. The understanding of randomness has brought about profound changes in the way we view our surroundings, and our universe. I am pleased that Leonard has skillfully explained this important branch of mathematics. --Stephen Hawking
Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 151
 Is Randomness Random? July 13, 2010
R. Chou (Los Angeles, CA USA)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
One can argue that being drunk and letting go of our inhibitions makes us do random things. If so, we're surrounded by all things random in a drunken stupor. This book explores all things random in fashion where nothing really is random at all.
Perhaps it is in man's nature to understand. Why we are not able to accept randomness because we then lose control. Perhaps.
The ideas presented in the book are interesting enough where you start looking around at your surroundings to notice what appear random or not so random. Its a bit ironic.
See, all things random, we throw mathematics, science, statistics and probabilities at it. Mathematicians over centuries and centuries have been studying random phenomenon.
So yes, randomness rules our lives but are they truly random any more if we're really able to approach it in a scientific method and label it with a probability of likelihood an event will occur?
In the end, the only probability that rules our lives is 50/50. Whether it will happen, or not. Whether you do, or don't. As Shakespeare's Hamlet states, "To be or not to be..."
Interesting read June 24, 2010
Zeb E. Barnhardt Jr.
I have not finished the book, yet, but I find it to be an interesting and thought-provoking read. Despite all careful planning, fortuitous circumstances play a major role in our successes as well as our failures or changes of direction.
"Wild guesses codified as likely outcomes" June 17, 2010
Linda Bulger (Penn Yan, NY)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
For those of us who trust our instincts, this book will show us the error of our ways. You may wonder whether a book about probability could hold your interest but physicist and author Leonard Mlodinow starts out gently and builds his argument that life is more random than we ever knew. At the same time he offers some reasoning tools that can improve our decision-making.
The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives (Your Coach in a Box) is structured loosely around a history of probability theory. Some of the biographical material about early thinkers in the field--Cardano, Fermat, Pascal to name a few--is essential to the story of how our modern concepts developed, but more forgettable than the concepts arising from their work. Mlodinow uses a wide variety of examples to illustrate the availability bias, the meaning of the sample space, and the law of large numbers; the latter states that the larger the sample, the more the average converges toward the expected value. The more times you toss a coin, in other words, the closer the number of heads will be to 50% of the tosses. That's one you could assume through intuition, but did you know that it took Jacob Bernoulli 20 years to prove it mathematically? And while the probability of flipping five heads in a row is ... well, not small (this is not a book about math), the odds of the sixth coin toss being a head is still 50%.
Mlodinow makes fairly interesting work of the "Monty question:" if you are on "Let's Make a Deal" and choose door #1 for a grand prize, and before revealing your choice Monty Hall opens door #2 to reveal a goat, then offers you the chance to switch to door #3, should you switch? You may be surprised to know that your odds of the grand prize are better if you DO switch. If you want to know why, read this book. The reader is handled gently as the discussion moves to statistics and the random distribution, or bell curve; and to the "drunkard's walk" of molecules moving through a liquid or gas.
I promise you that it's all more interesting than it sounds, and while I'm not about to take my new insights to the roulette wheel or the Lotto machines, I did spend a happy nine hours listening to the unabridged audio. Given Mlodinow's credentials as Caltech visiting lecturer and coauthor (with Stephen Hawking) of "A Briefer History of Time," I hope it's safe to say that this book simplifies without distorting the subject matter. It certainly entertains without over-taxing the reader's comprehension.
Linda Bulger, 2010
 Great story telling and subject. June 6, 2010
C-diddy (California)
Very fun to read and he packs lots of information in the book. Too bad more people don't understand statistics or conditional logic. In politics and business I see far too many errors in cause and effect. Just because something is correlated does not mean one caused the other or that they are always correlated. Great chapter on patterns.
So interesting, informative and funny, a must read June 6, 2010
Courtney Slocum
Upon reading this book, I never look at a statistic the same way as I used to. This book provides great examples, most of them funny, and explains things very clearly. I highly recommend this book.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 151
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