This was a different and interesting read! I was not sure how well I would enjoy or even understand a book about mathematical principles, but it was surprisingly easy to read and I learned a lot.

Kit Yates's "The Math of Life and Death" is a fun and engaging way to look at math and natural science. This pop-sci book is totally readable, explaining the math and science that we encounter (without realizing it) on a daily basis. The information and style of writing is appealing, and will be enjoyed by fans of pop-sci and non-fiction - including younger readers.

Every one in awhile I like to try and stretch myself by reading a book that I don't completely understand. This was one such book. Did I understand everything about these math principles? Nope. Did this book keep me riveted? To be honest, not really; I kind of had to plow through a half chapter in a sitting before my eyes started crossing. But I finished it and found it very readable. As I was reading, I felt as though I understood what the author was saying though not enough to explain it to anyone else (which I would count as true understanding).

Four stars
This book came out January 7th
ARC kindly provided by

Kit Yates uses true life examples and simple metaphors to explore some of the mathematics of our everyday lives. His chapter on the use and misuse of statistics should be required reading for every high school student. (I’m a math teacher, and I intend to prescribe it for my students!)

While the study of exponential curves may not be terribly exciting for most people, they are vital to understanding todays news headlines. Kudos to Yates for making these and other connections.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

With thanks to the publisher and Net Galley for this ARC.

Ask most people and they'll tell you that they are either strong or weak at math - and they probably made this determination in grade school and stuck with it. In "The Math of Life and Death," Kit Yates examines the mathematical principles we were all exposed to during our school days and demonstrates their connection to real world scenarios. When examining exponential growth, for instance, the book touches on pyramid schemes, short term growth in utero, nuclear power, viral marketing, and measuring population. Exponential decay is explained through using radio isotopes for dating alcohol and artwork. Probability is applied to the type of genetic testing undertaken by popular companies like 23andme.

Other interesting topics of discussion - complete with formulas and illustrations to help those of us who don't have the best head for numbers are: BMI, false positives and negatives in lab work for mammograms and Downs Syndrome, false convictions in court, claims made in advertising, the statistical connections between race and homicide, search engine algorithms, and the spread of diseases. Interspersed with these examples are brief histories of mathematical developments like the decimal system, standardized time keeping, the debate over dozenal vs decimal numbering, metric vs imperial, and the dangers of interpretation.

Above all, "The Math of Life and Death" calls all of us - even the less numerically savvy - to take responsibility for thinking about the numbers (often based on computer generated algorithms) we encounter in our lives. Are we being asked to pay a fair price at an online vendor? Is the sample size in a news article enough for us to apply the results to our lives? Is the GPS sending us on a route that makes sense? Yates writes, "We must remember, however, that mathematics is only as benign as the person or people who wield it... a little mathematical knowledge in our increasingly quantitative society can help us to harness the power of numbers for ourselves. [where] simple rules allow us to make the best choices and avoid the worst mistakes." By reading this book, you'll have a better grasp of those simple rules and better view of the math all around you.

Interesting take on numbers-based information, including the efficacy of screening test results, interpreting false positives, the value of second opinions, the function of scientific studies, absolute risk vs relative risk, and generally manipulating statistics to support a bias or adapt toward a given advantage.

I am a huge math person and love reading any and all books about math. This one was exceptional. I loved how it focused on the 7 main principles that it chose. Each one was filled with real life application, images, graphs, and very thorough explanations. The greatest thing about it was that you didn’t have to have a this tedious, extensive math background to understand. I truly loved this one and it would be a great addition to the classroom or personal library.

"However, approximately 85 percent of automated warnings in ICUs are false alarms."

If you're at all fascinated with numbers, you will love this book. There are no actual formulas in this book, instead what it shows you is how math is a part of every aspect of our lives from medicine to law to sales. This book is full of real-life stories, many you might know from hearing about them in the news and many others that are just as powerful. It breaks down the math behind the stories and shows the examples of how mathematics is an integral part of our lives even if it's not always obvious.

The powerful part of this book is when it highlights all the ways in which mathematics has been used/interpreted incorrectly and caused people's lives to be ruined or altered forever. When a monitor in the ICU is muted because it beeps too much and then it can't beep when in fact it needs to, it can (and does) kill people. When data is interpreted incorrectly (as it often is) it can (and does) cause innocent people to go to jail. These are real-life consequences of mathematical errors that cause people to behave in ways that (inadvertently) harm other people.

This book is full of powerful examples that make you feel both cringe with horror and delighted (I was so excited to find out that the ice bucket challenge had such a positive outcome.) But more often than not, it's a sobering look at the role math plays in our lives and the harm we can do when we misuse it.

I loved reading this book and if numbers are your thing at all, I can't recommend it enough.

thank you to Scribner and netgalley for an early copy in exchange for an honest review.

No Formulas. Just Numb3rs. In this book about how math shapes our lives, British math professor Yates doesn't take us into the algebra, geometry, and even trigonometry that we all use daily - whether we realize it or not. Instead, he takes an approach similar to the now decade old US television show Numb3rs, starring David Krumholtz and Rob Morrow, wherein he shows applications of higher level mathematics in fields such as epidemiology, medicine, law, journalism, elections, and several others. Yates cites real world examples including unjust convictions and Ebola outbreaks and many others to show how math was used incorrectly and what the math actually showed in that situation, to help the reader begin to get an overall sense of math without getting bogged down in the technical calculations. Truly an excellent book for even the more arithmophobic among us, as it shows the numbers all around us and explains how we can have a better sense of them.

Disclaimers: 1) I LOVED Numb3rs back in the day and would still be watching it if it were still on the air. 2) I have a computer science degree and very nearly got secondary mathematics education and mathematics bachelors degrees at the same time as my CS one - so obviously I'm a bit more attuned to math than others.

My problem with books on mathematics is never remembering the formulas, even from one chapter to the next. OK, and being bored with them is a factor too. Kit Yates solved these problems by not using any formulas, or even much math in his delightful (when not frightening) The Math of Life and Death. His secret is really simple: he tells stories. The result is always engaging, often infuriating and sometimes horrifying. We defy the math at our peril.

Using examples from the news, such as epidemics or murder investigations, Yates shows what underlies the events – the basic numbers that anyone can see do or do not add up.

The whole strength of The Math of Life and Death is the power of true events. Yates recognizes their value, and provides the background facts that fit with numbers that prove a point. In the hot new service of gene sequencing, he shows clearly how our assumption about identifying people by DNA samples can go wrong – badly – enough to incarcerate the wrong person. In his own case, 23andMe gave him a death sentence through a wrong interpretation of his genes. He proved it (to his great relief) with other such services and went back to show just how the numbers can lead analysis astray. Sloppy math is hard to prove, but can ruin lives.

He shows that something as unmathematical as algae needs an understanding of math. An algal bloom doubles in size every day, until it covers a lake - in 30 days. If you see the lake is half covered, how long do you think it will take for it to be covered completely? Most would calculate numerous days, based on when the algae first appeared and had reached the halfway point, but the correct answer is one more day. Mistakes like this lead planes to crash, which Yates also shows in painful detail.

Doctors are forever misinterpreting test results, giving patients false death sentences or false reassurances. Yates gives the example of breast cancer tests, by which doctors seem to predict nine out of every two cases of breast cancer in women. The numbers are pretty stark. With false positives from tests, 981 women out of a random 10,000 will be told that they have breast cancer. But of those, only 90 will actually have it. Ninety out of ten thousand (ie. nine per thousand) is not the pandemic plague that should cause panicked fear in women, but that’s how doctors present it when they are surveyed. Given multiple choice questions, doctors fare far worse than if they had chosen random answers. They are prejudiced in the false direction. They have the facts and the numbers wrong. The result is needless surgery, needless chemotherapy, and much pointless suffering.

There is a horrifying chapter on legal ignorance as well. So-called expert witnesses bamboozle judges, juries and opposing lawyers with mumbo-jumbo that no one challenges, because they don’t understand what was said. They just pick out a major conclusion from what they heard, and accept it as true and significant. The result is wrongful convictions. In the major case cited, a young mother went to prison for murdering her first two children, because an expert incorrectly claimed the chances of two children from the same family dying from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) was one in 73 million. (He made up the number himself.) That’s all the jury needed to know. It didn’t matter that the expert was wrong about the odds, or even that the children didn’t really die of SIDS. The number was so overwhelming, the decision was easy to make: she had to be guilty as charged. In upholding the conviction, the appeals court said no one would be fooled by such a wild claim.

This is the same principle that guides media claims, and why so few trust the media any more. Shopping for statistics and angles, reporters hone in on some startling number, and taking it out of context, draw conclusions that it doesn’t merit, or maybe worse, just leaving it there to fester in the imagination of people with no other facts to weigh. Absent those facts, the population divides into believers and non-believers, ever more extreme in their positions. It is no wonder that a Boris Johnson can lie about the massive amounts of cash sent to the European Union, and even when the lie is pointed out, it continues to be the foundation for leaving the union. The result has been utter chaos in a farcical government. So while it’s critical to have the numbers behind the claims, few do. Worse, fewer can master them, and a select group will manipulate them to their own advantage.

Yates also tackles algorithms, epidemics, and antivaxxers. The antivaxxers rely on a single, tiny, invalid and misinterpreted study by a (since) defrocked doctor, where he claimed to show that vaccinations cause autism. They don’t, as Yates relates clearly and concisely. Nonetheless, the news traveled from Britain the USA, where it has become gospel to millions who have no need of the facts. They accept the headline as all they need to know. The result is a resurgence of diseases long thought banished, with thousands suffering needlessly. Perversely, parents even mail licked lollipops to each other, so more children can be infected. They believe the false headline, and are ignorant of the death and disfiguration rates from these so-called rites of passage diseases. It is craziness squared, because the numbers were cooked and won out over the facts.

The Math of Life and Death is an endlessly diverting, pleasing, engaging and horrifying look at how lives are affected by the math. It is math in very human terms, and Yates excels at making it plain. And you don’t even have to do the math to see it.