The anumeric man.

Name: James Ronaldo Benavides Garzón

Code: 45171060

Reflect and understand the book

Sometimes coincidences are interpreted in a mysterious way or looking for some hidden
meaning. For example, find a person who has a birthday on the same day as us.
However, this is not unusual, but rather common. As the year has 366 days, considering
a leap year, it would be necessary to gather 367 people to be sure that at least two
people in the group were born on the same day. But if we settle for 50% certainty, the
first thing we can think of is that 366/2=183 people are needed. The answer, however, is
that only 23 are needed. In other words, exactly half of the time that 23 randomly chosen
people meet, two or more of them were born on the same day.

Part of the book is devoted to the reasons for so much anumerism and why so many
people have a phobia of mathematics. Most of the problem lies with the education
system, which somehow scares students and sows the seeds of that rejection. However,
there is also a part that corresponds to the student, and here I completely agree with
Paulos.
On this subject Paulos is dispatched, demonstrating how charlatans use biased samples
and manipulated probabilistic calculations to support their theories. In one passage he
devotes a few lines to the famous Infinite Monkey Theorem, which states that a monkey
pressing random keys on a keyboard for an infinite period of time will almost certainly be
able to write any Shakespeare work.
I won’t reproduce all the examples in the book, but I think one serves as a summary of
the rest. This is the issue of percentages, an almost elementary issue that is constantly
misused. Although many believe otherwise, the price of an item that has undergone a
50% increase and then a 50% cut has seen a net reduction of 25%. A dress whose price
has been reduced by 40% and then by another 40%, will have been reduced in total by
64, not 80%
We live in a time when, as never before in history, we have access to a huge volume of
information and statistics. However, it is the same technology that has made this
achievement possible, in part, that has lulled and/or demotivated a large percentage of
the population, making it indifferent to wonderful things, such as mathematics. This
anumerism that Paulos postulates ends up resulting in the use/abuse/misuse of
statistics, and from there to listen to the animas that are heard in the news or in the party
stands there is a very short step. In short, it is not an encouraging scenario, but the only
thing that can be done is to think that it can be reversed, and to try to contribute
something, however small, on our part.