Chance: A Guide to Gambling, Love, the Stock Market, and Just about Everything Else

by Amir D. Aczel

Book Overview

In Chance, celebrated mathematician Amir D. Aczel turns his sights on probability theory -- the branch of mathematics that measures the likelihood of a random event. He explains probability in clear,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1568583168
• ISBN13: 9781568583167
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: Basic Books
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.1" x 7.3"

Customer Reviews

What luck is all about!

Surely, this book about propability is written for the layman. But even if you are little more expert than that, it is quite good. I certainly enjoyed walking through memory lane in theory that I once learned in a probability course at University. The examples are many - and very thought provoking. From time to time the theory is only touched upon lightly - but no problem - Wikipedia.org (or other internet sites) might help you with the finer details of e.g. Bayes theorem, the secretary problem or what ever you might want more details on. And isn't it nice to know that you will have a 0.0005 chance of dying in a car accident if you live 5 years in France, or a 0.9999984 chance of surviving 20 flights this year. Or if 10 people gather in a room there is a 12 % chance of a birthday match. With 23 people in the room there is 50 % chance of match. You can't live without that kind of data! -Simon

CHANCE

This book covers alot of ground in discussing topics in probability without becoming too technical. The book is succinct, easy to read, and seems that is was meant to pique one's curiosity in probabilities teaching some interesting principles and ideas. These ideas could be further expanded with more of a specialized and more technical probability textbook.

Fun book

Very fun book, but had me wanting a lot more. One thing that was nice, was that it was so short, it made me feel a lot smarter than I am when I finished it in half a day.

Good for the Basics

Chance: A Guide to Gambling, Love, the Stock Market and Just About Everything Else by Amir D. Aczel This is a good basic intro to probability. It is accessible but it does have some equations in it. It gives the reader some concrete examples like the birthday problem that allow them to understand important concepts like random distributions. Probability and random events play a huge part in people's lives. This book can help people only slightly familiar with these concepts to get a better grasp of them. Do not put too much stock in the title it will not help you much with any of that.

The Guide to the (General) Future

Everyone knows that chance plays a huge role in our lives, in weather, auto accidents, and coincidental meetings, as well as in lotteries and other games. "What are the odds?" is a question we are faced with so many times a day that we probably don't even think about how many unconscious calculations we make trying to predict the future. Probability theory helps us do this; it is "humanity's attempt to use pure mathematics to understand the un-understandable." So writes Amir D. Aczel in _Chance: A Guide to Gambling, Love, the Stock Market, & Just About Everything Else_ (Thunder's Mouth Press). It is a book of mathematics, but it is not intimidating. It is accessible and small, readable in an evening (but readers may spend much more time working on the sample problems), and may present few surprises to those familiar with the subject. The presentation, however, is brisk and clear, and serves very well as a primer to this branch of mathematics. The pretty red and white cover of the book simulates the back of a playing card, and games of chance are a big part of the subject. Not only do the games themselves get examined, but dice and cards give good examples of how probability may be calculated. But more complex life examples are given. As the title insists, probability theory can help you find love (or, for that matter, a good apartment or a companionable puppy). Let's say you are entering a computer dating service, and you expect as many as a hundred relationships, each of which you will experience and then keep that mate or move on. If you just stop at the first prospect, there is a one in a hundred chance that it is the best match for you; similarly, if you get through all 99, the hundredth prospect has a one in a hundred chance of being the best match for you. Neither of those odds is very good. The mathematically best strategy is to date the first 37 matches, and settle on none of them. This enables you to learn about what you are doing and how well the population measures up to what you want. And then, starting with the 38th one, take the candidate that is better than any so far. There's a chance you won't find any such candidate, because the best match was in the first 37 you sampled; but as firm as the mathematics is, nothing in love is certain. As Aczel jokes, "Now, don't you wish your mother would give you advice like that?" There is gambling advice. If you wish to avoid losing money at the casinos, don't gamble. Don't make the mistake that if the die just rolled a two, it is less likely to roll a two next time; dice, or roulette wheels, or all the rest, have no memory. If you have to gamble, and you have a big wad of money to blow, play it all on one big play; if you apportion the money in a series of bets, the money will only be chipped away by the odds that always favor the house. You can get advice on shuffling; a deck riffle shuffled five times still has pockets of order, but seven times will produce randomne