How mathematics can save your life | Mathematics - Salon

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In “The Math of Life and Death,” Kit Yates shows how mathematics is crucial to understanding everything we do, explains Dan Falk (@danfalk) science journalist based in Toronto.

Photo: JumpStory

The Italian mathematician and astronomer Galileo Galilei is often credited with discerning the vital role played by mathematics in our attempt to understand the universe. In a 1623 essay titled "Il Saggiatore" ("The Assayer"), Galileo compares nature to a book that is laid open for us to read — but cautions that the book "cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth."

Galileo was thinking primarily of astronomy and physics, but Kit Yates, a mathematical biologist at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom sees no reason to stop with the physical sciences; in his new book, "The Math of Life and Death: 7 Mathematical Principles That Shape Our Lives," he argues that math is, in a nutshell, everywhere. And, as his title suggests, math matters: We need it to understand how nuclear explosions work and how infectious diseases spread (and how they can be stopped); we need it to make sense of medical studies and crime statistics, and to evaluate the arguments that lawyers present in the courtroom; we need it to send rockets into space — and to understand why NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter crashed to the planet's surface (spoiler: NASA was using metric figures while one of its contractors was using imperial units).

Though this is a fun and non-technical book (there are no equations), some of the topics are deadly serious. Take American crime statistics. Yates cites the work of a British journalist named Rod Liddle. In a provocative blog post published at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, Liddle declared that the greatest danger to black people in the U.S. is "other black people." He wrote, "Black-on-black murders average more than 4,000 each year. The number of black men killed by U.S. cops — rightly or wrongly — is little more than 100 each year. Go on, do the math."...

Yates is very much reaching out to those who struggled with math in school; he even insists that "this is not a math book." His conversational style helps as well. But I noticed that some of the ground he covers is well-trodden. Readers of Jeffrey Rosenthal's 2010 book "Struck by Lightning" may find some of Yates's themes (especially his discussions of probability and statistics) to have a familiar ring. Some readers will find a foray into the history of clocks and timekeeping similarly familiar. Still, there is much here to reward the mathematically curious reader; and I think Galileo would be pleased to see that we continue to benefit from looking at the world through a mathematical lens.
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The Math of Life and Death:
7 Mathematical Principles That Shape Our Lives

Source: Salon