Lavin Exclusive Speaker
How early should you get to the airport? Why do tall parents have shorter children? What’s the best way to get rich playing the lottery? In his “refreshingly lucid” (The New York Times) bestseller How Not to Be Wrong, Jordan Ellenberg shows us how math touches everything we do, in the same way that Freakonomics brought economics into the popular discourse. He unveils the hidden beauty and logic of the world and puts math’s power in our hands—in business and in life.
Math, as Jordan Ellenberg says, is “an atomic-powered prosthesis that you attach to your common sense, vastly multiplying its reach and strength.” Math helps every kind of thinker think better—it hones our intuition, sharpens our judgment, tames uncertainty, and lets us see the deeper structure and logic of our world. The Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Ellenberg is the author of two books: How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking, and The Grasshopper King, which was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. Recently, he served as a consultant (and actor, briefly!) for the film Gifted, directed by Marc Webb, who cast Ellenberg for the role because, in his words: “he’s just a really charismatic teacher.”
Ellenberg has held an NSF-CAREER grant and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and in 2013 he was named one of the inaugural class of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Wired, The Believer, and the Boston Globe, and he is the author of the “Do the Math” column in Slate. His Wired feature story on compressed sensing appeared in the Best Writing on Mathematics 2011 anthology.