Book review: The Maths of Life and Death | Book reviews - TES News

This book raises the key issue of ethics in mathematics - but it doesn't fully explore the human tragedies involved by Lucy Rycroft-Smith, produces the Mathmatips podcast for Tes.

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It’s 8pm on a balmy evening in March. I can barely contain my wildly spiralling thoughts as I watch a spellbinding lecture from Dr Hannah Fry, part of her acceptance of the Zeeman Medal for which I (as well as many others) wrote a glowing nomination.

Fry is talking about mathematics with her usual grace and humour, but the topic she has settled on has me particularly riveted. I wave my hand at her as she closes. She greets me by name, thrillingly.

“I was at a lecture by Paul Earnest last week about ethics in mathematics,” I begin. "He suggested that we should have better training for mathematicians, a national organisation, much more thought and awareness around the topic. What do you think?”

In his new book, The Maths of Life and Death, Kit Yates writes: “We should treat claims sceptically and ask for more information… Maths and statistics can be difficult to understand, even for trained mathematicians; this is why we have experts in those areas. If needs be, ask for help from a professional, a Poincaré [a famous mathematician], who can lend an expert opinion. Any mathematician worth their salt will be happy to oblige.”...

Balancing honesty and truth I acknowledge the paradox of finding the balance between telling stories with honesty and “truth” and telling them with a generous side of authorial sensitivity; navigating between the twin straits of fact and opinion is the most difficult issue facing writers in our time, and I don’t think Yates missteps significantly. (He also loosens up as the book progresses, and addresses these issues head-on.)

Another point Fry makes well is that so many mathematicians who are now being asked to work on problems of this magnitude are “young white boys”. Without better representation, the breadth of the input and therefore to some extend the quality of our decisions will be only as narrow as the pool of experts we have bothered to invest in. The author of this book cares about these issues and is interested in them, but not enough emphasis on them in the book left me slightly disappointed. 
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The Maths of Life and Death

The Maths of Life and Death by Kit Yates, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mathematical Sciences and co-director of the Centre for Mathematical Biology at the University of Bath.

Source: TES News