This book was truly a wonderful read! If you want to learn about math’s history, you will love this book 💕

You do not need to have a strong background in math to get the full punch from this story.

My favourite takeaways

Regression to the mean

Regression to the mean is the concept that, over time, event likelihood converges on the average result. Said another way, whenever an outlier occurs, there’s a good chance that the next event will be closer to the main outcome.

This idea has interesting implications within the workplace. Manager’s are stung when praising outstanding work that is followed by normal work; whereas chastising bad work is usually followed by better performance. However, neither the praise nor the reprimand likely had as large of an effect as regression to the mean.

Normal Distribution

The normal distribution is the result of randomness.

• Whenever you see a normal distribution not caused by randomness, be suspicious.
• When you carefully measure something, if you do not see a normal distribution where randomness should occur (i.e., measurement error), you have likely destroyed the randomness that should be present.

5/5.