Lavin Exclusive Speaker
How can you stop a pandemic from sweeping the world? Can ancient Greek proportions predict the stock market? And why is learning to play chess so much easier for computers than learning to read a sentence? New York Times bestselling author of How Not to Be Wrong, Jordan Ellenberg returns with an exciting new book asking the big questions. Much like its predecessor, Shape shows us how math touches everything we do—this time, zeroing in on the geometry behind the world’s most important scientific, political, and philosophical problems. Much like how Freakonomics brought economics into popular discourse, Ellenberg’s work uses math to unveil the hidden beauty and logic of the world around us—putting its power directly into 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 several books. His most recent, Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy and Everything Else, will be released in May 2021. With his trademark intellectual curiosity and jargon-free language, Ellenberg transforms a long-forgotten subject from our high school days into a powerful tool for measuring the world around us. His previous books include How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking—a beautifully written and refreshingly lucid mathematic exploration praised by the New York Times and Washington Post—and The Grasshopper King. 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.