How to analyse chance, ignorance and risk

An invaluable guide to thinking about uncertainty, from a master of the craft

A hazard of teaching mathematics rather than, say, history is that the homework is a lot harder to come up with. After all, “was Henry VIII a good king?” is a reasonable question to ask either a classroom of nine-year-olds or a lecture theatre of postgraduates. But “solve this quadratic equation” would leave the classroom nonplussed and the lecture theatre unimpressed. Maths is learned by doing, and devising a problem that is easy enough to be accessible, yet hard enough to be satisfying, is a devilish problem itself.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Known unknowns”

From the October 19th 2024 edition

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