Numerate Life: A Mathematician Explores the Vagaries of Life, His Own and Probably Yours

Employing intuitive ideas from mathematics, this quirky "meta-memoir" raises questions about our lives that most of us don't think to ask, but arguably should: What part of memory is reliable fact, what part creative embellishment? Which favorite presuppositions are unfounded, which statistically biased? By conjoining two opposing mindsets-the suspension of disbelief required in storytelling and the skepticism inherent in the scientific method-bestselling mathematician John Allen Paulos has...