- 384 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
About this book
A “fascinating, witty, and perspective-shifting” (Oliver Burkeman, New York Times bestselling author) tour of Bayes’s theorem and its global impact on modern life from the acclaimed science writer and author of The Rationalist’s Guide to the Galaxy.
At its simplest, Bayes’s theorem describes the probability of an event, based on prior knowledge of conditions that might be related to the event. But in Everything Is Predictable, Tom Chivers lays out how it affects every aspect of our lives. He explains why highly accurate screening tests can lead to false positives and how a failure to account for it in court has put innocent people in jail. A cornerstone of rational thought, many argue that Bayes’s theorem is a description of almost everything.
But who was the man who lent his name to this theorem? How did an 18th-century Presbyterian minister and amateur mathematician uncover a theorem that would affect fields as diverse as medicine, law, and artificial intelligence?
“Witty, lively, and best of all, extremely nerdy” (Tim Harford, author of The Undercover Economist), Everything Is Predictable is an entertaining and accessible illustration of how a single compelling idea can have far reaching consequences.
At its simplest, Bayes’s theorem describes the probability of an event, based on prior knowledge of conditions that might be related to the event. But in Everything Is Predictable, Tom Chivers lays out how it affects every aspect of our lives. He explains why highly accurate screening tests can lead to false positives and how a failure to account for it in court has put innocent people in jail. A cornerstone of rational thought, many argue that Bayes’s theorem is a description of almost everything.
But who was the man who lent his name to this theorem? How did an 18th-century Presbyterian minister and amateur mathematician uncover a theorem that would affect fields as diverse as medicine, law, and artificial intelligence?
“Witty, lively, and best of all, extremely nerdy” (Tim Harford, author of The Undercover Economist), Everything Is Predictable is an entertaining and accessible illustration of how a single compelling idea can have far reaching consequences.
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Yes, you can access Everything Is Predictable by Tom Chivers in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Mathematics & Applied Mathematics. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Introduction: A Theory of Not Quite Everything
- Chapter One: From ‘The Book of Common Prayer’ to the Full Monte Carlo
- Chapter Two: Bayes in Science
- Chapter Three: Bayesian Decision Theory
- Chapter Four: Bayes in the World
- Chapter Five: The Bayesian Brain
- Conclusion: Bayesian Life
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Notes
- Index
- Copyright