Book cover of The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives

Book description

Leonard Mlodinow's The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives is an exhilarating, eye-opening guide to understanding our random world.

Randomness and uncertainty surround everything we do. So why are we so bad at understanding them?

The same tools that help us understand the random paths of molecules can be…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Drunkard's Walk as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

A thread that ties together so many things.

Throughout science, math, finance, and your personal life… underlying almost everything is the concept of a random walk. I love how Mlodinow builds our intuition for this simple yet subtle idea. Yes, the expectation may be zero, but the variance grows without limit—it took me years of study to truly feel that statement and others in my bones, but Mlodinow shows this and much more through vivid, often hilarious examples. It is no exaggeration to say that after Chapter 6, you will understand conditional probability—where so many of us stumble when we…

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Fighting The Virus by Marc Mangel,

Many of the words used to describe disease ('infection', 'transmission', 'virus') are also used to characterize cyber security (for example: a computer is infected by a virus that can be transmitted to other currently uninfected computers). Using models from the population biology of disease shows this correspondence much deeper than…

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