Klein Project Blog

April’s Book of the Month is How To Lie With Statistics by Darrell Huff. Norton reissued this 1954 book in 1993, and this edition is available on Kindle. There is a 1991 Penguin edition and it has been translated into many languages.

This book may be over 60 years old, (and therefore the examples are dated), and statistics has certainly moved on since it was first published, but the volume remains a best-seller and is a humorously illustrated light introduction to many key ideas in statistics. It informs us about statistics through showing how statistical analyses can be used to fool and create misunderstanding.

For other translations look here: Indonesian, Thai, Czech, Turkish, Greek

March’s Book of the Month is: The Exact Sciences in Antiquity by Otto Neugebauer. Second edition published in 1957 by Brown University Press, now republished by Dover in 1969.

Commentary adapted from the Amazon website, see this link for further information: Based on a series of lectures to non-experts 1949, this is the standard non-technical coverage of Egyptian and Babylonian mathematics and astronomy. It reveals that the Babylonian strength in algebraic and numerical work is comparable to the mathematics of the early Renaissance in Europe. In the realm of astronomy, it describes a sophistication which is interpreted less as the result of millennia of observations (as used to be the interpretation) than as a competent mathematical system. An Appendix discusses certain aspects of Greek astronomy and the indebtedness of the Copernican system to Ptolemaic and Islamic methods.

February’s Book of the Month is: The Story of a Number by Eli Manor. First published in 1993 and available in paperback in the Princeton Science Library.

From the “Goodreads” website. See here for more details.
“…. Geared to the reader with only a modest background in mathematics, the book describes the story of e from a human as well as a mathematical perspective. In a sense, it is the story of an entire period in the history of mathematics, from the early seventeenth to the late nineteenth century, with the invention of calculus at its center. Many of the players who took part in this story are here brought to life. …. The unifying theme throughout the book is the idea that a single number can tie together so many different aspects of mathematics …. The book ends with an account of the discovery of transcendental numbers ….”