“This is a superb book—important and fun to read. We live in an age in which all people need to be fluent in two languages—words and numbers. Yet our schools do not teach and our students do not learn to be quantitatively literate. This book demonstrates what traditionally is not taught, but desperately needs to be—the application, uses, and abuses of numbers."
—Arthur Levine, President of Teachers College, Columbia University

We are confronted with numbers everyday in our academic, personal, and professional lives. Every time we look at a grade point average, pay a bill, glance at a food product’s nutritional value, or read the stock page, we are seeking quantitative information. With the proliferation of computers and the Internet, numbers are spreading faster than ever. We don’t just live in an “information age”, we live in a “quantitative information age.”

In What The Numbers Say, authors Derrick Niederman and David Boyum present clear and comprehensible methods to help us understand, process, and calculate our way through the world of “data smog” that we live in. Avoiding abstruse formulations and equations, Niederman and Boyum anchor their presentations in real-world situations by covering a particular quantitative idea in relation to a particular context—such as probability in the stock market or percentages of interest rates.

This book uses much more than money examples to illustrate quantitative concepts. Students will learn why there were such dramatic polling swings in the 2000 U.S. presidential election and why the system of scoring for pairs figure skating was so controversial—and flawed—in the 2002 Winter Olympics. Such examples show readers that good quantitative thinking skills are not only practical, they can also be interesting and even fun.

 
DERRICK NIEDERMAN received a B.A. in mathematics from Yale and a Ph.D. in mathematics from MIT. He is the author of This Is Not Your Father’s Stockpicking Book, The Inner Game of Investing, and A Killing on Wall Street. DAVID BOYUM received a B.A. in applied mathematics and a Ph.D. in public policy from Harvard. He has been a visiting scholar at the Yale School of Management and a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at Yale.