Jason Rosenhouse

Recently bought Jason Rosenhouse’s “Games For Your Mind The History and Future of Logic Puzzles,” his 2020 volume on, well, the history and future of logic puzzles. Just scanning through it’s pages I can tell it is a delightful compendium of puzzle and logic topics, certainly including many familiar classics, but also with material I think most readers will find new to them. On top of that I have always enjoyed Rosenhouse’s writing (indeed I’m surprised he isn’t a bit better known in the popular and recreational math writing arena). His “The Monty Hall Problem” is a fabulous treatment of that popular puzzle, and he did a similarly wonderful full volume on Sudoku, as well as co-editing other volumes on recreational math, and editing a great tribute to Raymond Smullyan.

https://tinyurl.com/yz9cs9go

Many who are familiar with Rosenhouse first became aware of him though through his former “Evolution Blog” at the old Science Blogs site. That blog title became a bit of a misnomer after he ventured into all manner of topics, having started off focusing on the evolutionist/creationist wars. His writing was always crisp and incisive whether covering math, puzzles, chess, education, politics, or culture, in addition to the original evolution theme (which he also authored a book about). Even when I disagreed with his viewpoint I always admired his logical step-by-step commentary and argumentation, and highly recommend, if you're not already familiar with him, get so, with this current Princeton University Press volume likely a great place to start.

Bayes-mania

Seeing an awful lot written on Bayesian ideas in the last year (and week!).
Jason Rosenhouse uses the Monty Hall problem and a NY Times article as a launching point for a discussion of the subtlety of Bayes here:

http://scienceblogs.com/evolutionblog/2014/10/01/a-poor-description-of-the-monty-hall-problem/

Rosenhouse takes the Times' article to task, and ends simply with:

"Applying statistics correctly is hard, even for people with professional training in the subject. But the problems are found in the complexity of real-life situations, and not in the underlying philosophical approaches to probability and statistics."

(Rosenhouse's 2009 book on the The Monty Hall problem is great, by the way, if you've never read it -- yes, an entire volume on that one problem)

Meanwhile, The Guardian also presented Bayesian statistics this week: http://tinyurl.com/ojjazs4

And in other statistics briefs, Jeff Leek tries to come to the defense of much-maligned p-values here:
http://simplystatistics.org/2014/09/30/you-think-p-values-are-bad-i-say-show-me-the-data/ 

Math Education... It's Not Just About Math Content

Jason Rosenhouse posted a great piece last Friday (in his usual succinct style), "Americans and Math," (in response to a NY Times piece that got lots of coverage):

http://scienceblogs.com/evolutionblog/2014/07/25/americans-and-math/

I'm sorry I didn't see more attention given to Jason's post because I think he touches on several points others leave out of the debate over American math education and "innumeracy." He tries to account for why changing math education is so difficult and always has been, including "why it is so difficult to change the habits of math teachers." And he includes some nice examples along the way, as well.

He notes that two of the "big elephants" getting ignored in the debate are the effects of 1) class size and limitations in school resources, and 2) widespread poor respect/support for the teaching profession in general.

In short, the Common Core debate (and Rosenhouse admits he doesn't know a lot of the specifics about Common Core) isn't a simple argument over the best approach to teaching math, but inevitably entails a lot of other variables that ought be part of the discussion.

I encourage all with a stake in this ongoing debate to read Jason's take.