| Summary: |
This book is for people who think they can’t do numbers and
moreover don’t want to do them, perhaps because ‘doing numbers’,
in the form of studying mathematics at school, has been associated
with feelings of struggle, bewilderment and incompetence. For many
such people, even if numbers eventually were mastered, numerical
form
ulae still seem less adequate at explaining the complexity of the
wo
rld, or of personal experiences, than language or artistic forms.
This sense of inadequacy and boredom with numbers can be uncom-
fortable for bright, imaginative young people, used to succeeding
intellectually in other areas of the curriculum based on linguistic and
creative skills, such as English, history and the arts. Such feelings can
lead to rejection and suspicion of any kind of knowledge which is
based on the systematic acquisition of data analysed in numerical
form
;w
e have found this to be the case with many students and col-
leagues throughout our careers. Yet much of the everyday knowledge
we
all have about the world does come in numerical form, or can be
translated into that form for easier manipulation and prediction.
Often we do not realise that when we ‘calculate the odds’, we are
dealing in mathematical probabilities, or that when we make value
judgements about what is ‘best’, ‘better’ or ‘worse’, we are manipu-
lating ‘ordinal data’.
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