[Book Review] The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow

Rating: 4/5

Genre: Non-fiction

Book Review

If you think that mathematics mainly for academic, this book might change your view. The book talks very little about basic probability principles. Rather, it focuses on how the principles were discovered, what it meant in the old time and the present time, and the fallacy associated to them.

I am quite familiar with probability. So, I find myself reading this book enjoyably. As a student, I was wondering why should study difficult and boring mathematics. If you are like me, you might find this book quite interesting. This book gives the readers the reasons why mathematics matters to, say for example, engineers, statisticians, or even lawyers.

Another interesting part of this book is the  history. There are stories of great mathematician and scientists such as Gerolamo Cardano, Galileo Galilei, Blaise Pascal, Jacob Bernoulli, Thomas Bayes, Laplace, Carl Friedrich Gauss. Who would have know that Thomas Bayes was a minister. Pascal suffered from his illness when he did too much thinking.

The book is interesting. It looks at aspects that I usually overlook. It keeps me engaged for most of the content. Overall, I like this book.

Takeaway

Life is full of random events. Good lucks are rare. Bad luck are common. Therefore, bad lucks aren't bad lucks. There are just common things.

Do not be too proud of your talents. Success derives from a combination of talents and good lucks. A lot of talented people fails several times before they succeed.

Despite its important role, chance is not something we can control. The good news is another important factor that we can control is the effort. This means you can increase you chance of success by not giving up. Believe and keep trying.

Do not judge people just from the results. Talent is more important than results, as bad results might just come from bad luck.

Table of Contents

• Chapter One: Peering through the Eyepiece of Randomness [Part 1,Part 2]
• Chapter Two: The Laws of Truths and Half-Truths [ Click Here ]
• Chapter Three: Finding Your Way through a Space of Possibilities [ Part 1, Part 2, Part 3]
• Chapter Four: Tracking the Pathways to Success [ Click Here ]
• Chapter Five: The Dueling Laws of Large and Small Numbers [ Click Here ]
• Chapter Six: False Positives and Positive Fallacies [Click Here ]
• Chapter Seven: Measurement and the Law of Errors [ Click Here ]
• Chapter Eight: The Order in Chaos [ Click Here ]
• Chapter Nine: Illusions of Patterns and Patterns of Illusion [ Part1, Part 2, Part 3,  ] 
• Chapter Ten: The Drunkard’s Walk [ Part 1, Part 2, Final Part ] 

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Book or Audiobooks?

Personally, I prefer audiobooks. It's fun, and I can listen when I'm doing something else. It also makes other activities (e.g., jogging) a lot more fun. For more detail about audiobooks, please read [this post].

There is one more reason that may encourage you to go for the audiobook version. You can get it now for FREE. Audible offers you a free trial for 14 days. Even if you get the book and cancel the subscription right away (so that you don't have to pay), you can keep the book. And, don't worry if you lost the audiobook file. Just log into audible.com. You can keep downloading the over and over again.

About the summary: It takes time to finish up a book. And, when you do, sometimes, you want to review what you learn from the book. If you do not make notes as you read, you might have to go through the book once again. This can be time-consuming when you are dealing with a book. But you can still flip through the book and locate what you are looking for.

However, when the material is an audiobook, it is extremely hard to locate a specific part of content. Most likely you will have to listen to the entire audiobook once again.

This book summary will help solve the pain of having to go through the book all over again.

I am leaving out the details of the books. Most books have interesting examples and case studies, not included here. Reading the original book would be much more entertaining and enlightening. If you like    the summary, you may want to get the original from the source below.