Lady Luck

Whether to carry an umbrella, buy insurance, or back a racehorse, many everyday choices cannot be settled with a plain yes or no. Such decisions often depend on probability, a way of reasoning that matters in ordinary life as much as in advanced research. This book introduces that subject without requiring advanced mathematics.

The author, Warren Weaver, was a mathematics professor who later worked with the Rockefeller and Sloan foundations. He was an authority on communication and probability and was known for making scientific ideas accessible to the general public. His discussion draws on the work of thinkers such as Kurt Gödel, Susanne K. Langer and Nicholas Bernoulli. Topics include permutations, independent events, mathematical expectation, the law of averages, Chebychev's theorem, the law of large numbers and probability distributions.

Weaver applies this way of thinking to rare events and coincidences, to the relationship between probability and statistics, to gambling, and to modern scientific research. The mathematics stays elementary, and the examples are chosen to hold the reader's interest. The edition includes 49 drawings by Peg Hosford, 13 tables, a foreword and an index.