Geekspeak: Why Life + Mathematics = Happiness

How Life + Mathematics = Happiness

Dr Graham Tattersall

This book is written in memory of my father, who helped raise six children as well as quietly goingthrough life inventing, analysing, and mendinganything and everything.

All photos, unless stated, taken from Stock.XCHNG.com.

Introduction: Living with Numbers: #347053, Aleksander Milosevic, Belgrade, Serbia

GEEKSPEAK

LIVING WITH

NUMBERS

How Much can you work out about your own world?

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by how things work. There’s a whole world of cogs, circuit boards and equations behind familiar objects and events, or the figures and statistics we see in the media. I can pinpoint the exact moment when this fascination was born: it was as an eight-year-old child on a family trip to the Scottish Highlands. Frantically looking for a way to distract his squabbling children, my father announced that ‘The first person to tell me the weight of that mountain gets to sit in the front of the car.’ I took on the task, excitedly shouting out wrong answers.

This was power – working out a new number, a new piece of knowledge about the world that hadn’t existed ten seconds earlier. And, it happened in a person’s head. It was amazing.

And that was it: I became a Geek.

A family friend dropped by after our return. He was an amateur radio enthusiast, and his car was festooned with all sorts of antennas. ‘Watch this,’ he said through a large smile, and placed his finger at the bottom end of an antenna.

The faint, sweet smell of burning flesh drifted towards me as the current from the antenna flowed through his skin, heating and burning its extreme outer surface, but without the strength to cause any pain or real damage.

I was transfixed. How had that happened? Why hadn’t it hurt? How deep had the current penetrated? And, was it possible to work out how much energy had been spent in his finger? Here were more questions, more knowledge to attain, more facts and figures, all calculable inside a person’s head.

The fascination with the simple conjuror’s trick of the burning skin has stayed with me, as a desire to explore the hows and whys lurking behind everyday life. And that, in a nutshell, is what this book is about: how to analyse your world and come up with your own new knowledge and understanding.

But perhaps most importantly, it’s about your ability to judge and check ‘expert’ opinion for yourself rather than take it as granted – about using your numeracy to be better informed in debates about our shared future.

Have a look at a couple of ‘expert’ assertions. Do you believe them? How would you judge their validity?