Talk Back

[Stumbo]

Inspired by his unhappy experience as a WorldCom shareholder, the author -- best known as the originator (and/or popularizer) of the term "innumeracy" -- set out to "lay out, elucidate, and explore the basic conceptual mathematics of the market."

Unfortunately, a better title for this book would be A Psychologist Plays the Stock Market. The author goes on and on about how in order to pick winning stocks, you must go by not what you think but by what you think others think, or even by what you think others think others think, and so on. Numerous studies are cited, such as one in which people are asked to estimate the population of Ukraine (sic -- it's "the Ukraine," dammit), and give different answers depending on whether the first question is "Is it greater or smaller than 200 million?" or "Is it greater or smaller than 5 million?" What little mathematics appears is either trivial and irrelevant, or stated without proof. Oh, and there's also at least one (gratuitous and unilluminative) Escher reference. Dude, that's so 70s.

And maybe it's just me, but I doubt very many readers enjoy plowing through pages upon pages upon pages of turgid prose that can be summarized, "Some say that if a stock price is higher (respectively, lower) than its historical levels, that means it's on an upward (resp., downward) trend, so it's time to buy (resp., sell); some say that it means it's currently overvalued (resp., undervalued), so it's time to sell (resp., buy); and some say that markets are efficient, so it doesn't matter. I'm not sure who's right." -- which imparts about as much information as "Today could be Monday, or Tuesday, or Wednesday, or Thursday, or Friday, or Saturday, or Sunday; I'm not sure which."

(And finally, as this little puzzle demonstrates, the proofreading was done by complete idiots. This was the last straw, for me; I couldn't bring myself to open Chapter 4.)

Applying one of the above-mentioned theories, I had pegged this book as a Strong Buy, because at $3.98 on the remainders shelf it was far below its 52-week high of $25. I was wrong.

[shaw]

I was going to buy this book - I now will not, based on your noitadnemmocer.

[Eisworth]

Amen.

Barry Mazur's "Imagining Numbers" is even worse -- here the reader gets to plow through page after page of literary allusions and anecdotes only tangentially related to the point hand -- namely the geometric interpretation of complex numbers. I couldn't decide if he was aiming for "I'm smart -- see, look at all the stuff I know" or "If mathematicians can know literature, then poets ought to be able to know some mathematics".

John Conway's "Book of Numbers" is worse than this -- too much mathematics for a casual reader, too little mathematics for a mathematical reader.


Most writers will admit to being clueless about mathematics. I wish more mathematicians would have the same realization about their own writing abilities.
_________________
Todd Eisworth
Associate Professor of Mathematics
Ohio University