Book Review by Charles Seife A MATHEMATICIAN READS THE NEWSPAPER by John Allen Paulos Basic Books. 212 pp. $18 "We are all going to starve," cries one newspaper. "The Earth's population, laid end to end, would stretch to the moon and back eight times. There are simply too many people on the planet for us to survive for long!" "Don't panic," exclaims another. "If every man, woman, and child on Earth were given a cubical room measuring 20 feet per side, all of the apartments would fit inside the Grand Canyon. There's plenty of pace for everyone!" Which one is correct? Both are. In a similar vein, imagine that someone accidentally dumps a radioactive chemical (something like tritium hydroxide) into the Atlantic. Over time, the chemical spreads evenly in the world's oceans, and several years later, every pint of water in every ocean in the world contains about 6,000 molecules of that chemical. Newspapers would carry furious headlines like "Tremendous Spill Causes Cataclysmic Contamination." How big was the spill? One pint. Americans are scared and awed by mathematics, so most people don't have an intuitive grasp about what numbers represent. This allows spin doctors to manipulate stories to suit their interests. John Allen Paulos, author of the best-selling Innumeracy, exposes their tricks in A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper. But Paulos, a professor of mathematics at Temple University, does not stop there. The book is a mathematician's perspective on the news, and Paulos writes about DNA testing, NAFTA, affirmative action, the SATs, tennis, the gulf war, AIDS, and even aliens from outer space. Why would anyone care about Paulos' opinions on subjects that are out of a mathematician's realm of experience? After all, scientists, economists, politicians, educators, sportscasters, historians, doctors, and Shirley MacLaine are the authorities on those news stories. Paulos demonstrates that mathematical knowledge is crucial to understanding newspaper articles. Paulos shows the "experts" little mercy. For instance, though economists theorize about when distant recessions will begin and end, their predictions are seldom correct. With cutting logic, Paulos uses chaos theory to explain their inevitable inaccuracy. Complex systems such as the weather and the economy share an extreme long-term sensitivity to slight changes in conditions. The oft-repeated example that a butterfly flapping its wings in China on Monday can cause a hurricane in Philadelphia on Friday is more than mere hyperbole. It is the reason that meteorologists rarely hazard a prediction beyond the five-day forecast. Just as the kingdom was lost for want of a nail, small events have big consequences as their effects propagate through time. The same problem haunts economists and market analysts. Imagine that a banker's indigestion causes him to refuse a loan. This causes a company to have its credit rating downgraded, shaking faith in a sector of an industry, sending ripples through the economy. An emperor cannot account for every nail in the kingdom; a market analyst cannot predict the actions of every banker and trader. As a result, we must take long-range economic or political predictions with a very large grain of salt. A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper is an unusual book, and doing justice to it in a short review is impossible. Its format mimics that of a newspaper. Organized into roughly 50 short articles, it deals with topics in politics, business, social issues, soft news, science, the environment, - even the obituaries. Each section provides new insight and new methods for interpreting a news story. Trade negotiations are linked to game theory. Conditional probability sheds light upon health scares. Paulos tilts at subjects from the "appropriately named" Laffer Curve of Reaganomics to the overly precise calorie counts in food sections. He lays bare a number of tricks of the spin doctors and offers some way to see through the fog of advertisements. Even better, Paulos' wit and humor - admirably displayed in Innumeracy - are in top form. His irreverent and pointed comments entertain as well as educate. Though Paulos writes about a bewildering number of topics, he has something fresh and interesting to say about each. The book provides a toolbox full of mathematical ideas perfectly suited for extracting the truth from a newspaper article. Paulos forces the reader to rethink positions on political and social issues without paying much attention to the issues themselves. Instead, he attacks the logical framework on which these positions rest - with amazing effect. He draws the reader into a mathematician's world; in the process, he introduces abstract concepts from information theory to conditional probability. His adept explanations are simple and accessible. Like Innumeracy, A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper is an excellent place to pick up some math - math that is interesting and vital for understanding the news. After reading A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, it will be impossible to look at a newspaper in the same way. Book Review by Lee Dembart A MATHEMATICIAN READS THE NEWSPAPER by John Allen Paulos Basic Books. 212 pp. $18 Every newspaper publishes an article of pure fiction every day. It appears in the business section, and it purports to explain why the stock market went up or down the day before. You know the one. "Stock prices rose yesterday on news of the invention of a new light bulb." Or, alternatively, "Stock prices fell yesterday on news of the invention of a new light bulb." A million things happen every day, and any of them can be seized on after the fact to "explain" stock prices. No article ever says simply, "Stocks rose yesterday because more people wanted to buy than wanted to sell. The day-to-day movement of stocks is essentially random." No article ever says that because we insist on believing that every effect has a simple, discernible cause and we insist on finding patterns in everything, even when there are none. This is one of the main insights of John Allen Paulos' irreverent new book, A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, the title of which is somewhat misleading. This book is not about mathematics, and it's not really about newspapers. It should be called, "A Clear Thinker Explains the World." To be sure, Paulos is a professor of mathematics at Temple University in Philadelphia, and in the past he has written about mathematics for general readers. His book Innumeracy was a bestseller a few years ago. But in his new book, he means "mathematician" in a broader sense: Someone who by training and temperament thinks logically and rationally. Similarly, Paulos writes here about newspapers, for which he has great affection, but he writes about them as they reflect the foibles of the world and the people who inhabit it. This is press criticism, but not of the usual kind. (The right wing says the press is liberal; the left wing says the press is conservative.) This is press criticism of the sort that George Orwell had in mind when he observed that what's important isn't news, and what's news isn't important. As individuals and as a society, we focus on the wrong things. Thus Paulos explains that most of the hand-wringing about environmental dangers misunderstands the nature of risk and puts too much emphasis on rare or unlikely events. "If unlimited amounts of money are spent on inconsequential hazards," he warns, "little will be available for significant ones." Do cellular phones cause cancer? "It's easier and more natural to react emotionally than it is to deal dispassionately with statistics," Paulos writes. This is a subversive book. Paulos argues that the world is so complex that it cannot be accurately described, much less manipulated. We always look for the cause of things, but we usually ignore coincidence as a possibility. "The real story is often as dependent on chance as on intention," he says. We continue to believe that there are simple explanations and that if only the right person is elected President, he or she can push the right button or pull the right lever and create jobs, feed the hungry, end crime or close the ozone hole. In general, Paulos says, people -- not just newspapers -- oversimplify things that are too complicated to be understood in any case. The economy, for example. Has anyone noticed that predictions by economists are almost always wrong? Newspapers and television come in for their share of criticism, too. Paulos is scathing in describing person-in-the-street reactions to this, that and the other thing, which he describes as "the widespread tendency to present blather and call it news." Paulos' main complaint is that people are not rational. We have spent billions on the war on drugs. Paulos reports that 8,000 Americans a year die from cocaine and 6,000 a year die from heroin. By comparison, he says, 400,000 Americans die every year from smoking, and we subsidize the growing of tobacco. Sometimes Paulos' musings stray a bit, giving the book a certain flavor of "thoughts while shaving." There is one interlude about the nature of self and another about the information glut: "Data, data everywhere, but not a thought to think." There is also some of the familiar complaint that Americans can't do percentages and can't see through huckster claims in advertising or politics. Here comes an insight from mathematics: "Skepticism should guide us when we read about any political, economic, or military policy of any complexity." But this is a wise and thoughtful book, which skewers much of what everyone knows to be true. As such, it is likely to have no impact Whatsoever on the way people think and the way things are done. After all, they have to fill up the newspapers with something. Even book reviews.