The Drunkard’s Walk

I was walking to a lecture this afternoon when a new poster in one of the engineering building captured my attention. It was about the next Perimeter Institute public lecture entitled The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. A weird coincidence since it happened to be the title of the last book I read. I thus decided to write about it and here I am.

As the subtitle of the book says, this book is about randomness and how it affects our lives. The author, Leonard Mlodinow, is already a known author in the scientific world for other books he wrote. His most famous one is probably A Briefer History of Time, a book he co-wrote with Stephen Hawking.

As opposed to a lot of scientific books, The Drunkard’s Walk doesn’t require a good knowledge in the domain of probability and statistics to be understood. However, it can be useful for a total comprehension of the concepts covered. Dr Mlodinow uses a progressive approach, by starting simple and adding more an more theory chapter after chapter. He never goes deeply into the equations so it is possible to follow just by grasping the concepts.

As I said before, he starts simple with basic probabilities. He then follows by an introduction to the law of large numbers as well as Bayesian probabilities. An interesting thing about this book is that the author uses an historic approach throughout it. This leads to a more fluid progression since he talks about every concept in the order they got discovered. The reader also get to learn more about all the strange persons that made mathematics what they are today. After the first few chapters, the author switches from probabilities to statistics. He introduces the normal curve as well as the law of errors through different examples. This is another interesting point of the book. Dr Mlodinow shows concrete applications of the theoretical concepts he describes. His examples usually turn around sports or the financial world and make it way easier to understand the book. He ends his book with a few chapters on how humans often misinterpret probabilistic results. He writes about the illusion of patterns and gives different examples of bad uses of random data.

Overall, The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives is a good book. On the theoretical side it is sometimes weak with some equations missing or some concepts not explained deeply enough. However, considering the amount of material covered (relatively similar to my IB probability and statistics course), it is understandable, especially if the goal was to make the content understandable by the average reader. However, it goes way deeper into the effects of probabilistic events on our lives then most stats courses.

Tags: Books, Leonard Mlodinow, Mathematics, Probability and Statistics