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Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus |
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KNOCK ON WOOD
Luck, Chance, and the Meaning of Everything
For readers of Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Daniel Levitin, with a twist of Bill Brysona lighthearted, entertaining and fateful exploration of luck in everyday life
For centuries, people around the world have prayed for good luck and warded against bad. Jade, clovers, rabbits' feet, wishbones: these items have lined the pockets of those seeking good fortune. For some, it's bad luck to walk under a ladder, to enter and leave a home through different doors or to say "Macbeth" in a theatre. But is there such a thing as luck, or does luck often just explain common sense? You won the lottery not because of any supernatural force, but because a random number generator selected the same numbers that you picked out at the corner store. You run into a neighbour from your street on the other side of the world: Random chance or pure fate?
Jeffrey S. Rosenthal, author of the international bestseller Struck by Lightning: The Curious World of Probabilities, was born on a Friday the thirteenth, a fact that he discovered long after he had become one of the world's pre-eminent statisticians. Had he been living ignorantly and innocently under an unlucky cloud for all those years? Or is thirteen just another number? As a scientist and a man of reason, Rosenthal has long considered the value of luck, good and bad, seeking to measure chance and hope in formulas scratched out on chalkboards.
In Born on Friday the Thirteenth, Rosenthal, with great humour and irreverence, divines the world of luck, fate and chance, putting his considerable scientific acumen to the test in deducing whether luck is real or the mere stuff of superstition.
JEFFREY S. ROSENTHAL is a professor of statistics at the University of Toronto. He has been awarded the CRM-SSC Prize, the SSC Gold Medal, Fellowship of the Royal Society of Canada and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the COPSS Presidents' Award. Rosenthal's first book, Struck by Lightning, was published in fourteen countries and in ten languages. Visit him at Probability.ca and on Twitter @ProbabilityProf.
Jeffrey S. Rosenthal, author of the international bestseller Struck by Lightning: The Curious World of Probabilities, was born on a Friday the thirteenth, a fact that he discovered long after he had become one of the world's pre-eminent statisticians. Had he been living ignorantly and innocently under an unlucky cloud for all those years? Or is thirteen just another number? As a scientist and a man of reason, Rosenthal has long considered the value of luck, good and bad, seeking to measure chance and hope in formulas scratched out on chalkboards.
In Born on Friday the Thirteenth, Rosenthal, with great humour and irreverence, divines the world of luck, fate and chance, putting his considerable scientific acumen to the test in deducing whether luck is real or the mere stuff of superstition.
JEFFREY S. ROSENTHAL is a professor of statistics at the University of Toronto. He has been awarded the CRM-SSC Prize, the SSC Gold Medal, Fellowship of the Royal Society of Canada and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the COPSS Presidents' Award. Rosenthal's first book, Struck by Lightning, was published in fourteen countries and in ten languages. Visit him at Probability.ca and on Twitter @ProbabilityProf.
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Book
Published 2018-10-01 by HarperCollins |