Randomness by Deborah Bennett, Harvard University Press,
拢15.50/$22.95, ISBN 0674107454
THE job of popularising the thorny field of probability does not come
naturally to assistant maths professor Deborah Bennett. Randomness
lacks the fluency of most successful popularisation. But it is about as far from
the ordinary failure鈥攁lways dull, often cursory鈥攁s it is possible to
get. Bennett鈥檚 angular, urgent, pedagogic prose maps an entire mathematical
discipline famed for its difficulty, and puts it into a historical,
philosophical and theological context鈥攁ll in 188 pages.
Working out the odds is a famously counterintuitive business. Bennett
identifies our deep-seated need to anthropomorphise and even cast ourselves as
actors in problems involving chance, ruining our objectivity. Gamblers
beware.
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By contrast, her approach to problem solving, from primitive dice to
false-positives in modern medicine, is hugely redundant. One is continually
tempted to bound over the odd boiler-plated paragraph, only to come sloping back
two pages later: Bennett is a faultless guide to uncertain territory.
It is when we move from one area to another that we find ourselves careening
over prose gone horribly hard and incomprehensible. At a crucial point, Bennett
fails to convey how random samples are used in statistical analysis. This throws
out of focus鈥攁t least for the 鈥渁irline passenger and the lottery player鈥�
for whom the book was ostensibly written鈥攐ne of her best chapters: an
unputdownable lay history of (of all things) random numbers.
The great strength of this book is the way it uses history and even
prehistory of probability to chart its present territory and cast light on its
core point of contention: does true randomness exist in nature, or is it only a
psychological artefact? But the final chapter, on probabilistic paradoxes, can
only cheapen the questions Bennett raises. For readers complacent in the
knowledge that nature abhors a paradox, the problems here collapse like houses
of cards under the simplest rhetorical analysis. No maths is required.
Randomness is an over-designed book that fits no known jacket
pocket. But Bennett鈥檚 text is another matter: it is like a caf茅
conversation between likable cognoscenti. Eclectic, energetic and disorganised:
nothing could more provoke and excite the reader.