Product details
- ISBN 9781472947413
- Weight: 400g
- Dimensions: 136 x 220mm
- Publication Date: 19 Apr 2018
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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'Fascinating' - Financial Times
Algorithms are running our society, and as the Cambridge Analytica story has revealed, we don’t really know what they are up to.
Our increasing reliance on technology and the internet has opened a window for mathematicians and data researchers to gaze through into our lives. Using the data they are constantly collecting about where we travel, where we shop, what we buy and what interests us, they can begin to predict our daily habits. But how reliable is this data? Without understanding what mathematics can and can’t do, it is impossible to get a handle on how it is changing our lives.
In this book, David Sumpter takes an algorithm-strewn journey to the dark side of mathematics. He investigates the equations that analyse us, influence us and will (maybe) become like us, answering questions such as:
- Who are Cambridge Analytica? And what are they doing with our data?
- How does Facebook build a 100-dimensional picture of your personality?
- Are Google algorithms racist and sexist?
- Why do election predictions fail so drastically?
- Are algorithms that are designed to find criminals making terrible mistakes?
- What does the future hold as we relinquish our decision-making to machines?
Featuring interviews with those working at the cutting edge of algorithm research, including Alex Kogan from the Cambridge Analytica story, along with a healthy dose of mathematical self-experiment, Outnumbered explains how mathematics and statistics work in the real world, and what we should and shouldn’t worry about.
A lot of people feel outnumbered by algorithms – don’t be one of them.
David Sumpter is Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Uppsala, Sweden. Originally from London, but growing up in Scotland, he completed his doctorate in Mathematics at Manchester, and held a Royal Society Fellowship at Oxford before heading to Sweden. His scientific research covers everything from the inner workings of fish schools and ant colonies, analysis of the passing networks of football teams, and segregation in society to machine learning and artificial intelligence.
David has written for The Economist, The Telegraph, Current Biology, Mathematics Today and FourFourTwo magazine, amongst others. He has been awarded the IMA’s Catherine Richards prize for communicating mathematics to a wider audience. David’s first book was Soccermatics: Mathematical Adventures in the Beautiful Game.
