The Drunkard's Walk
Book description
Leonard Mlodinow's The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives is an exhilarating, eye-opening guide to understanding our random world.
Randomness and uncertainty surround everything we do. So why are we so bad at understanding them?
The same tools that help us understand the random paths of molecules can be…
Why read it?
1 author picked The Drunkard's Walk as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
A thread that ties together so many things.
Throughout science, math, finance, and your personal life… underlying almost everything is the concept of a random walk. I love how Mlodinow builds our intuition for this simple yet subtle idea. Yes, the expectation may be zero, but the variance grows without limit—it took me years of study to truly feel that statement and others in my bones, but Mlodinow shows this and much more through vivid, often hilarious examples. It is no exaggeration to say that after Chapter 6, you will understand conditional probability—where so many of us stumble when we…
From Philip's list on have your own science or math ideas.
If you love The Drunkard's Walk...
Tap Dancing on Everest
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
The team attempts a new route up…
Want books like The Drunkard's Walk?
Our community of 12,000+ authors has personally recommended 32 books like The Drunkard's Walk.
Share your top 3 reads of 2024!
And get a beautiful page showing off your 3 favorite reads.
1,884
readers submitted
so far, will you?
📚 If you like The Drunkard's Walk, you might also like...
From One Cell
Everybody knows that all animals—bats, bears, sharks, ponies, and people—start out as a single cell: the fertilized egg. But how does something no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence give rise to the remarkable complexity of each of these creatures?
FROM ONE CELL is a dive…
What Walks This Way
Nature writer Sharman Apt Russell tells stories of her experiences tracking wildlife—mostly mammals, from mountain lions to pocket mice—near her home in New Mexico, with lessons that hold true across North America. She guides readers through the basics of identifying tracks and signs, revealing a landscape filled with the marks…
