Are you dazzled into instant submission by numbers? You shouldn’t be, says Charles Seife, a veteran science writer who teaches journalism at New York University. In his recently released book,
Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception (Viking Adult, 204 pages), Seife argues that numbers aren’t really the supposedly cold, hard, and objective things that don’t lie; in fact, he says, they are very often used to justify false information, foist half-truths, and hoodwink the public into believing almost anything.
According to Seife, “proofiness” is the art of using pure mathematics for impure ends, like bringing down competent and trustworthy government officials so they can be replaced with undeserving ones, convicting the innocent and acquitting the guilty, ruining national economies, and fixing the outcomes of elections. “Our society is now awash in proofiness,” Seife says in the book. “Using a few powerful techniques, thousands of people are crafting mathematical falsehoods to get you to swallow untruths… When you learn to shovel proofiness out of the way, some of the most controversial topics become simple and straightforward.”
In “Fibbing with Numbers,” a book review of Seife’s
Proofiness in the September 17, 2010 issue of
The New York Times, Cornell University applied mathematics professor Steven Strogatz says that more than a math book,
Proofiness is an eye-opening civics lesson that “reveals the truly corrosive effects on a society awash in numerical mendacity.”
Read an excerpt from Charles Seife’s Proofiness in The New York Times now!Read Steven Strogatz’s review of Proofiness in The New York Times now!ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Charles Seife, an American author and journalist, is currently associate professor in journalism at New York University. He had done freelance work for
New Scientist,
Scientific American,
The Economist,
Science,
Wired UK, and
The Sciences and has written five books, namely
Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea,
Alpha & Omega: The Search for the Beginning and End of the Universe,
Decoding The Universe,
Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking, and the latest,
Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception. He has an undergraduate degree from Princeton University, an M.S. in mathematics from Yale University, and a M.S. in journalism from Columbia University.
