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Known unknowns How to analyse chance, ignorance and risk An invaluable guide to thinking about uncertainty, from a master of the craft The Art of Uncertainty. By David Spiegelhalter. Pelican; 512 pages; £22. To be published in America by W.W. Norton in March; $32.99 Ahazard 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. Partly for this reason, books that successfully communicate how mathematicians think, but are aimed at those not already in the tribe, are both valuable and rare. Over the decades many eager students h
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