Struck By Lightning-Jeffrey S. Rosenthal

Mathematics—along with many other subjects throughout my schooling—was a stingy bugaboo that I found to be difficult to absorb. Ratios, fractions, and formulas were rather disconcerting and frustrating to figure out. I do recall a few "AHA!" moments here and there—when the door to numbers would unlock itself and reveal the prize of a correct sum at the end of an equation—but more often than not I found myself riddled with confusion when things would never grow to become clear.

So it only figured that I would launch myself into a career field where the nucleus revolves around sharp, hasty, and pressure-filled mathematics.

On the floor, at the other side of the rope in the gaming pits, from the perspective of both dealer and pit bosses alike, numbers are thrown at you from the minute you clock in until it is time to go home. Greedy players will mercilessly (and sometimes deliberately) vomit numbers at you while you try and figure out how to pay off a $491.00 blackjack at the same time as another dealer is about to send out $1500 in purple cheques ($500 value) over on a hit of 8 nickels ($5.00 value cheques) straight up and 10 splits while another player wants you to check on his rate of play to ensure he has lost enough money to convert his points into a cheeseburger.

And all of this is generally expected to be done within the window frame of 2 minutes (give or take) and you had damn sure get everything right on the money as well, because, upstairs, where the checks and balances are counted in black and white ink, they are absent of empathy and care nothing for your plight. You either protect company assets with a fine tuned calculator in your head or out the door you go.

Having said all this, you would think that my attitude towards mathematics would be rife with cynicism. That—since it was culpable of so many bouts of anxiety and anger—I should frown upon its presence in my life in any capacity.

But this is not the case.

When you remove the witless and flawed one-size-fits all educational systems and swindling and weaponized application, I have actually found mathematics to be rather…um…GULP…fun.

"1. Mathematics is the language of nature. 2. Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers. 3. If you graph these numbers, patterns emerge. Therefore: There are patterns everywhere in nature."-Maximillian Cohen

You can adopt a poor attitude toward numbers and their complexities to your hearts content much as some people tend to do with money. But at the end of the day this will eventually get you nowhere. It is a habit tantamount to hating water, air, or fire. These essentials for modern living can either be your friends or your enemies. And much like everything else in life, there is a natural exchange of reward for effort when you take the time to respect the language of nature and learn to use such a rudimentary thing as numbers to your advantage.

Struck By Lightning, the curious world of probabilities by Jeffrey S. Rosenthal was another happy accident I stumbled upon in the basement of Lakewood Library when I was digging for paper investments.

Similar to Jazz, Cooking, and Sports. Mathematics was a field that I knew a lot about in some areas, but was completely oblivious to in others, but held a boatload of respect for.

In Rosenthal's book, where probabilities take the center of attention, it was a field that I held a particular amount of interest in.

I used to see the law of averages swallow up players on a daily basis and reduce them to nothing. Then I would see this addled application play out in areas outside of the casino through television ads and news reports and the knee jerk reactions that followed.

I never trusted these ads nor the actors getting paid to perpetuate them and Jeffrey Rosenthal's book serves as proof to the notion that my intuition was spot on.

Through easily digestable dialogue and engaging examples Rosenthal draws comprehensive corollary's between the falsity in pharmaceutical advertising, news reports, and casino odds and how human beings tend to react and fall prey to unfathomably bad luck, that, at the end of linear regression, proves to be nothing more than plain old math.

I will try to reiterate three things I took away from this book to the best of my ability.

*I highly recommend going directly to the source of this novel, where it is explained with much greater clarity.*

The first one is Poisson Clumping, a mathematical theory posited by French mathematician Simeon-Denis Poisson in 1837. Whereby randomness is anything but random at all, but only a natural phenom that eventually proves to dispel the myth surrounding itself over time.

For example, if you were to throw a bag of 100 marbles onto an enclosed rectangle it should only be natural for some of those marbles to coagulate within several groups, or, clumps while several others either double up or remain solitary. This is an irrefutable fact that will be seen %100 of the time in a world which abides by the laws of rationality. What would defy the laws of rationality would be if the marbles aligned in perfect symmetrical cadence exactly one inch away from one another. Or, if they were to stand one atop of another straight up in the air. Or, for the sake of argument, were to (without the assistance of balance) hoard into the four corners and avoid the center completely.

This same theory can be applied mathematically within the morose headlines of your morning paper. The example Jeffrey Rosenthal gives is a series of five homicides that hit Toronto in the first week of November in 2003. Predictably, the newspaper exploited the murders and as a result the public was in an uproar and demanded stricter precautionary measures to be taken by the Toronto Police Department and panic ensued at this seemingly uptick in maniacs that had arrived to disrupt the harmony of social order.

Using poisson clumping mathematics, or, linear regression to find the p-value, Rosenthal explains how if you were to catalog the recorded murders over the course of 71 weeks—including the rash that began on the week of November—that it averages out to be a 1.5% chance of five homicides happening within a single week. Probable? No. Possible? Obviously. And contrarily speaking, there is only a 22% chance of a week going by without a single homicide, and Toronto indeed, experiences many weeks where nobody gets killed.

"But I have yet to read a headline that screams "NO MURDERS THIS WEEK!"

The second amusing anecdote is the Monty Hall game show equation which was brushed upon in the movie 21. Whereby, if you were to be on a game show and the host offers you a chance to open one of three doors to win a car. But behind the other two are ghosts. Before you chose, the host opens a door, free of charge, exposing a ghost. Through the removal of any emotional attachment and ego to your original choice, it is mathematically in your favor to alter your original choice and open the other door. This, through the application of linear regression according the law of the variable of change, will always be in your mathematical favor.

*The explanation beneath this preceding hypothetical was hotly debated for years, and does require further insight beyond my butchered paraphrasing, but is indeed a rather fun application of math.*

Then there is the underlying deceit of pharmaceutical companies whose barter and trade is based upon your health. Through slyly authored advertising, the big pharma companies insist that they have your health at the forefront of your mind. Your health is their wealth. Or, so they say. But mathematics attest to the contrary. For if everyone was healthy, then there would be no need for the abundance of antidotes thrust upon us. But therein the burning question remains. With all the breakthroughs in medicine, why are people's mental health and overall obesity levels in the shithouse?

Rosenthal then uncovers the harrowing truth behind several pharmaceutical companies that either ignore the required p-value of the FDA, or blur the lines through biased testing to achieve what is their ultimate goal: money.

Rosenthal cites several examples of misguided studies where fraudulent numbers are provided to common people as a means of verifying how effective their product is.

Through a timeless joke to prove his point, Rosenthal tells the tale of a student trying to tie together the relationship between a frogs legs and its ability to jump. He sets the frog at a starting line and commands it to hop. It obeys and jumps 82 cm "Aha! A frog with four legs can jump 82 cm," he proclaims. To further test this theory, the student grabs a scalpel and slices off one of the frogs legs and begins the process over again. This time the frog hops just 32 cm. He does it again, and with 2 legs the frog only hops 20cm. Again and the frog hops only 8cm. Finally, the student slices off the final leg and commands the frog to hop. It doesn't move. He tries again. Nothing. "Eureka!" He shrieks. Immediately he has found the answer to his hypothesis that has eluded humanity for centuries. He proclaims his fascinating conclusion to the room: "After arduous studies, I have concluded that frogs with no legs are deaf!"

Another hypothetical example he gives is a study conducted by a person unfamiliar with the effects of smoking. Whereby she evaluates the results of 25 smokers at a pack a day. Rather than take into account the rot of their lungs and yellowing of their fingertips and gums as BOTH being a result of smoking, she sees the similarity of yellowed gums and fingertips as being a reasoning behind their lung cancer. As a result of false conclusions, yellow crayons are forbidden in children's hands and smokers would rock latex gloves, both none the wiser to the fact that they simply look ridiculous while continuing to bar-b-cue their lungs.

Taking this all into account, it is just as confounding to me now (as it was then) why some people continue to wear facemasks outside of hospital rooms in general public.

There are many other untouched avenues of fascinating mathematics in regards to probability that Rosenthal explores that I was unable to brush upon in this review. Simply put, this book is a wealth of knowledge that will open many doors of knowledge for a miniscule investment of your time. Rosenthal is a brilliant man and I really, really enjoyed his work and highly recommend giving this one a read.

Grade: A

Verdict: Read