A Mathematician Plays the Market
By John Allen Paulos
Penguin Books pound;12.99

What do you do if you’ve lost a packet gambling on the stock market, and you’ve been hiding your losses from your wife? To make matters worse, you’ve been swept up in a market bubble that people at the time identified as “the madness of crowds”. And to crown it all, you’re a professor of mathematics who has made an international name among students and readers for demystifying, explaining and applying rationality and mathematics to life.

The answer is, you write a book exploring the theory of markets, the limits to rationality, the role of chaos, and how small causes can have large effects.

Read more in this week’s TES

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