Book Review - The Drunkard's Walk - Leonard Mlodinow

Another book trying to escape a book. Mlodinow desperately wants to push the theme: humans make errors because they are not only not wired to incorporate random outcomes in their analysis, but also are wired to impart patterns to outcomes that are actually random. The law of small numbers is an example of this. This is the double wammy that makes us dumber than rats in some behavioral studies. Unfortunately, the author barely comes close.  Instead, 80% of the book covers the history of probabilistic thinking through statistics through the mathematics of error which culminates into the useful math of statistical mechanics.

The stories and anecdotes, Dr. Mlodinow (who has collaborated twice with Hawking!) relates are wonderful and well-told. The progression is thoughtful and coherent and interesting. Yet, the text stops well short of the math of "decision analysis,"which makes the chit-chat on poor human thinking beneath many other authors from both breezy and mathematical perspectives.

The modern editorial decision to exclude even one mathematical expression from a book on mathematics or even an illustration limits the work. While the book might read well on a Kindle(tm), books on this topic should be on an iPad/web with hyperlinks. The irony of an exceptionally intelligent author writing about the limits of human action, using weak tools that he emasculates even further, doesn't bring a smile to my face.

While this review sounds negative, it should be noted that The Drunkard's Walk is better than the average pop science/math book.  Learning about Cardano's development of outcomes in a sample space was inspiring and the restatement of the importance of Bayes, without putting him down, was uplifting. This helped counter the exasperation of reading about Bernoulli's golden theorem four times without being told what it was. De Moivre was mentioned and more could have been said of Polya's role in fully proving De Moivre's Central Limit Theorem, but 20th century math doesn't exist in the book!

In summary, Mlodinow's book joins other pop books in providing one very important value: it is a quick read that provides scaffolding for a reader, not to go further intentionally, but to allow advanced work a home in the brain later. For example, decades ago, if I had known of Riemann's great contribution to geometry, I would have realized in the years ahead why I was being taught particular items and they would have stuck better.