That but we dont know yet . Guest to give an example thats been in news lately we have known for thousands of years that there are many prime numbers like two, five, seven, 13 who. They are almost next to each other. We dont know whether they go on and on forever and we steadily get closer and closer. Host what does it matter if we know what prime numbers are not our . Guest that is a great question. Heres what he know about math it seems to describe the basic structure of the way things are. Examples always bring massive advanced knowledge that we are constantly using things that were developed purely for the sake of understanding not in the idea of practical application. Host where did you come up with the title . Guest i had the title before i knew what the book was going to be about. Host it was about how to hide and the reason for that title is because i want people to think about mathematics not as a kind of sterile theory of exercise to be quite honest that is their interaction but it was created to solve a problem. Thats our agenda because people wanted to be less confused and one of the things they try to do in the book is take these mathematical things and talk about what problems they were originally for. What was it like in the process of figuring it out . Host what does the series will . Guest which was right from the start. It tells you if you have a right triangle they square him like this and you know how long this site is. Its useful to stand up straight so that its much less than most of the stuff i work on in my day job. Host you told the story in your book about abraham. Who was he . Guest he was in the purest purist but let me tell you he grows up and then is working and not stray a and in the 30s he has to leave. He ends up in the United States. They are working at the lab and i had no idea there were these statisticians that there was a group of generals that come to this group of researchers they say we noticed something funny. Theres more bullet holes and parts than others. They are getting hit more and we want to know how much more should we be putting on the places where the planes are getting hit more. You dont want to put too little on or it wont stay so maybe there is a mathematical formula you can give us on the part of parts of the plane that are getting hit more. He says you have it completely wrong you have to put it where there are no bullet holes. Its not that they cant get their planes on the engine. So its not like a sample. They are seeing the ones that didnt get shot on the engine so thats interesting about this is that he didnt actually give them the kind that they were expecting. He didnt give them a spreadsheet number. Nonetheless, what he did was deeply mathematical. Is it the right question in the first place and getting the answers to questions pretty easy host you talk about the curve is it, first of all what is it and is mathematically defensible . Its too good not to tell anyway but it is meant to depict is the following. How high should taxes be . If the tax rate is zero they wont get any money and that is pretty clear. Lets say that it was 100 the nobodys going to work or if they do they will find ways to hide it and the government gets no revenue. Somewhere in between, it has to go up and then down. There is an optimal rate. He believes they are over on this side of the curve where increasing taxes would bring the government revenue down. Thats what the economists universally think so he was pretty right about the general picture that there is some way to taxation which is so high that increasing it further reduces the amount of taxes that the government actually get. Host how is it that Steven Pinker comes up in the book how not to be wrong . Guest seems very mathematically reflective and i was struck by the most recent book that is quantitative in nature. I hide it from my kids because they i dont want to ask a lot of questions. Its quite a grand peaceful now than it ever has been. The world has also acted much bigger now so in terms of the percentage of the people who are killed or otherwise injured by some calamity there are things that happened a long time ago that are proportionately speaking quite a bit worse. So this raises an interesting question which is do you think that the calamity that kills 10,000 people in the population with say 100 million is the same thing as a calamity that killed to save 100,000 people in the world of the population ten times as big a. This is an interesting question because it mixes both math and the general testament. Thinking quantitatively what are you doing if you try to measure the scale for some kind of disaster whether it be a natural disaster. Host i think that he appears in the chapter. How much is that worth in debt america . What is that chapter about . Guest it refers to back to the place people try to convey the sense they say it is a population of 20,005 Climate Change is to displace a thousand of them in the lower lining region that is the same as if 15 million americans were displaced so how much of that is in debt america. It takes something far away. You would say that is the same as 500 americans so when i say when i say this is a great example of you can set up the math. You say do they mean the same as 500 american lives. Is that really what i want to say and that is a great example of the things that have to go hand in hand with all the other parts like your aesthetic mind, the general commonsensical mind. Host we use that quite a bit, dont we . Is one of the points in the book and i think when you talk about lying you talk about malfeasance into someone that is trying to pull the wool over your eyes. Everyday we claimed the paper i rolled my eyes at and i say most of the time the large majority of the time its not somebody being intentionally honest it is somebody that is full of themselves. Especially if they find a way to enlist some kind of numerical data to the cause and its not because they are trying to intentionally cheat you that they are cheating themselves. Host we talk today talked today on political issues of income inequality. How do you look at that as a mathematician cracks guest i think the question is how do you measure income inequality and look at two different societies and say is this one more unequal than not when or how do you look at the same society into different period of time and say how has inequality changed . Here at least to the best of my knowledge if you compare the United States and today with the United States i grew up in a dont think there is any dispute of the the society is more economically unequal you can use any measure you want and that story is pretty clear that host disobeys its at sundays extent should they played for two hours or ten hours . Guest ive been to the table once in my life i lost 20 i think that it took me about four seconds so i dont have enough capital. Host you talk about gambling in your book. Guest it is such a fascinating case because once again, people have moral feelings about the mathematical feelings about it. I think Everybody Knows that for most people in those circumstances, it isnt a wise investment if you have money that you want to do something with, probably playing blackjack isnt the most revenue enhancing choice that you could make. Its one of the most popular kind of gambling, it is incredibly popular and almost everyone will tell you it is a bad bet. They make quite a lot of money over many years but that is a very unusual situation. People actually in joy playing the lottery. They hope to win. You get a certain amount of money of entertainment and that is a big part of peoples motivation doing it. Guest can you quantify and join it and how much fun youre having and see how many dollars is that worth so on the one hand you can say it is a hard problem and on the other hand they do trade dollars for fun all the time and say i will go to this movie so whether or not it can be made mathematically precise i would say it is absolutely a mathematical question for the utility of entertainment and a lot of people dislike gambling because they dont like that feeling of being unsafe or like a negative utility of playing the lottery so they assign numerical values to all these things. Host the baltimore stockbroker where did you come up with that and who is he . Guest is a figure of mathematical folklore and i will explain how it works. You get in the mail a newsletter from a stock tip. This particular stock is going to go up so you read this and assume that its a scam but you look at the newspapers and say that indeed it did go up. This is the stock is going to go down and you read the business section the next day the stock has gone down. Another week goes by you get a tip and another week goes by, ten weeks in a row to correctly predict the motion and at that point you are pretty amazed. Thats the baltimore stockbroker. What dont you know about the story . On the first day of the baltimore stockbroker sends out a thousand newsletters. 500 say that its going to go up at 500 say that its going to go down. Then they get a tip that its going to go down into the same stock is going to go up so he is covering all his bases. Then you are the lucky winner depending on how you look at it, the unlucky one who is completely convinced. You dont have to have a thousand. One is enough. So what it symbolizes mathematically is you cant always make a good inference. Its amazing how somebody gets ten in a row. If you have a thousand chances you can do that. A lot of stuff can happen if you give yourself enough chances to get it right. Guest its the word of the year ended the decade. Its an amazing subject and i would say if i had one thing to have something to say about it we could do another hour. Its no more difficult than adding up to two members. Whats interesting is what we have now in the social networks and Internet Usage we have a lot of stuff. I would go so far as to say they have to invent a new statistic as we go the old methods are not suitable for this kind of data that other things like what we did one at a time. Now we are trying to figure out how to view it so it is an exciting time to figure out how do you make sense of the spreadsheet . That isnt what its built to do. We have to figure out how to interpret those numbers and we dont know yet. I think a lot of people will have an interest in making good inference is from it. I dont think we do get i hope that we will. Host we have been talking at the university of wisconsin with the mathematics professor Jordan Ellenberg held not to be wrong is the name of the book the power of mathematical thinking. Booktv on location. Reports on people across the country have taken on the challenge of reading about every u. S. President. 27yearold andrew who reveals the president ial biographies on his blog the president s project compares the term of the president to a baseball season and in that no president has won 162 games in the president s of ten. Bob timmerman a 50yearold librarian who completed his reading challenge in one year the virginia investment banker steve floyd reads multiple biographies and expects to complete his reading after four years by president s day 2016. For those looking to protecting their own president ial biography challenge he suggests that looks american president s series by arthurs messengers junior. The most recent focuses on Ronald Reagans tenure. You can read the full article on the posting booktv has covered numerous biographies and you can watch the authors on the website, booktv. Org. Hes not majoring in urban studies and he had an assignment he had to give an economic or via the rich neighborhood so he goes and a Police Cruiser drives by and i told this story and in the book the Police Cruiser drives by the secret uturn, plus on the sidewalk, jumps out the hits and with a flashlight, looks up and says who are you and why are you here. He says im a student and im doing an assignment. The Police Officer says the park closes at 9 30 and he says that its only 7 30. He comes up with his hand on his weapon and says the park closes at nine. He says we dont want any trouble and they walk away. The other is flint michigan. There is a Community Devastated as you know by the loss of manufacturing Automobile Industry now dealing in the fact that theyve been poisoned because of bad water. What does that mean is somebody made that decision not upgrading the pipes and has is a post from going to detroit. So from policing to who has access to the opportunity you know the social science data says that for every opportunity they get in the workplace they will get four or five opportunities. You can watch this and other programs online that booktv. Org. Good afternoon. Im the director of the institute and it is a great pleasure and honor to be here this afternoon to moderate the panel and the celebration of a wonderful new book. What we are going to do this afternoon is have some presentations and responses to the buck. They undertake this discussion and im going to introduce them all briefly and then they will speak in the order that weve determined. It will begin with a brief presentation of the book and its main issues and history by catherine. Its a wonderful institution that we are so happy to collaborate with and shes the author of the perils of marriage a quality in the press of 2050 just recently out. Catherine has been working on gender justice and the Transitional Justice come issues of gender and race and law. Shes a legal theorist and public intellectual and its just an amazing human being. I am so happy to be celebrating her this afternoon. Our speakers will go in this order. We will have patricia williams, the author of alchemy, race and rights and you know dont know her from her monthly column for the nation magazine which you can subscribe to at the wordpress. The second speaker is the associate professor of sociology at Bernard College and co. Directs the center for the Minority Aging Research at the school of medicine. Her Research Examines the intersections of gender, class and orientation and her first book is invisible families, identities, relationships and brotherhood and was the winner of the outstanding book award by the American Physiological Association section. Shes working on a second project entitled the shadow of sexuality social history and social support among africanamerican lg bt elders. The third speaker is with the Director Center for the study of law and culture. Kendall thomas is the coeditor of the key writings that founded the movement and also the coeditor of what is left in the theory. The most recent writing has focused on the law and culture of the politics, racial democracy in brazil and the law wall and politics of neoliberalism in ti