Innumeracy: A Light-Hearted Look At A Serious Problem

John A. Adam

Tiverton joke.

The accents, I think, are fairly typical for the gentlemen described in the
joke. Those of you who know me well know that I have a selection of about
forty such accents that I bring into play in my classes from time to time, but
rest assured, the two in the joke are the only ones you’ll probably hear this
evening, apart from my own dulcet tones. Not even the Crocodile man,
Steve Irwin, makes it into this evening’s talk , and no cartoons either, so
get ready for a dry old presentation with only one visual aid at the end…

But to return to that joke – there is a point to it, namely that mathematics is
applicable to almost every human endeavor I can think of. The following
two stories set the scene for some of my later points.

Smithsonian/dinosaur joke.

JFK gardener joke – about a famous French soldier, Marshall Lyautey, who
asked his gardener to plant a row of trees of a certain rare variety in his
garden the next morning. The gardener, while agreeing to do so, cautioned
that trees of this kind take a century to grow to full size. “In that case,”
replied the Marshall, “plant them this afternoon.”

There are many serious problems we face in today’s society: poverty, health
care, disease, famine, terrorism, wars, natural disasters, …you name it…but
from an educational perspective, problems of illiteracy, while of a different
order, are still profound, even in this country. By illiteracy, in addition to the
obvious meaning I include both scientific and mathematical illiteracy. I shall
concentrate here on the latter – Innumeracy – which is defined by the
mathematician and best-selling author John Allen Paulos as mathematical
illiteracy. His 1988 book Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its
Consequences, is the only book I will plug this evening! He has written
several others also, and I commend to you his monthly column entitled
Who’s Counting? You can find this on the web at abcnews.com, where he
writes about many newsworthy things from a readable yet mathematical
perspective.
In this talk, I want to try and raise our awareness of the problem of
innumeracy, but I certainly don’t pretend to have all the answers to solve it!
In light of poor U.S. school science and mathematics scores compared with
many other countries, this is clearly something we cannot afford to ignore.
In fact so often we hear the seemingly acceptable, apparently even amusing
statement: “Oh, it’s not surprising that my son can’t do math – I was never
any good at it either.” Translate that into “Oh, it’s not surprising that my son
can’t read – I can’t either”, and you begin to see the problem. There is a
social stigma associated with being unable to read, but not so, it appears with
being innumerate. So often, it seems, the badge of innumeracy is worn
proudly for all to see: “I can never balance my checkbook!” Speaking as one
who is not proud of my inability to balance my checkbook in a way that
makes sense to my wife (“What on earth have you done here?”), all I can
offer by way of explanation is that accountants deal with numbers, and
mathematicians deal with concepts!

Now I’m not talking about advanced mathematics here, and before you
conclude that I’m being an arrogant academic let me point out that I
struggled with mathematics as a teenager, often failing my exams and
ending up near the bottom of my class in the subject, so I can identify with
people who also struggle with it. I will not go into that story here except to
say that if you know of someone who has my book, ask to borrow it and read
the prologue entitled “Why I might never have written this book.” (That
doesn’t count as a plug, does it?)

[Ginny – I was invited to speak to this group as an author, so I was

introduced as such, and I said I would not plug my book because they had
done it so well! http://www.pup.princeton.edu/titles/7686.html]

I certainly don’t want you to leave here depressed by what I’m about to
share – after all, my title belies that! Along the way, I will attempt to
surprise you with some of the wonderful insights that mathematics can
reveal about the events around us, and perhaps to correct some potential
misunderstandings also. And herein, I think, lies at least part of the answer
to the problem of innumeracy: to use the power of elementary mathematics –
the science of patterns – as a means by which the invisible is rendered
visible, to paraphrase Keith Devlin, and in so doing to induce excitement and
curiosity among the listeners. That is a tall order in general, but not to
attempt it would be far worse than to attempt and fail! And so first, to the
bad news…

Many students – and many otherwise educated adults, sad to say, – cannot
interpret graphs, don’t understand elementary statistical concepts, are unable
to model simple situations mathematically, seldom estimate or compare the
magnitudes of things, are immune to mathematical beauty, and rarely
develop a critical, skeptical attitude toward numerical, spatial and
quantitative data or conclusions. [Paulos] Depressing, huh? Related to this is
the fact that very few educated people even understand what mathematics is.
I expect some people known to you – no one here of course – think that
people like my colleagues and me spend much of our time playing with long
strings of dreary numbers, doing long sums! Someone has said that this view
of mathematics and mathematicians is the very cholesterol of mathematics,
clogging our nation’s educational arteries.

In fact, in Alice’s adventures in the Looking-Glass she has a conversation

with the Mock-Turtle about all sorts of subjects taught at school: reeling,
writhing, and the four different branches of arithmetic: ambition, distraction,
uglification and derision. Of course, all the other subjects are there: mystery,
ancient and modern, seaography, drawling, laughing and grief. They were
called lessons, because they lessened each day, and the teacher was a
tortoise, because he taught us! Of course, Lewis Carroll a.k.a. Charles
Dodgson was a mathematician at Oxford, so he was probably well aware of
the problem of innumeracy in his own era. But I believe it is very much
worse today.

What is mathematics? In short, it is the science of patterns (Lynn Arthur

Steen); a means by which the invisible is made visible (Keith Devlin). You
heard those phrases a few moments ago. What mathematics does best is to
reveal to the human mind hidden patterns in many different fields of
knowledge. With the word patterns now in the back of your mind, I will
briefly address two topics of fundamental importance in the fight against
innumeracy: quantity and uncertainty. If time permits I would also like to
mention the problem of scale – simple insights into what happens as things
get bigger; (in particular why King Kong could not exist), and about which
one may encounter some very strange ideas. But if time does not permit, I
may instead just have to explain why I’m so enamored of the Crocodile
hunter…
Some years ago I developed a course designed to provide our elementary
and middle school student teachers with an appreciation for simple
applications of mathematics, and to give them ideas on how to formulate so-
called “real world” problems in mathematical terms. I soon found out that in
many cases the biggest problem they had was not so much the mastery of
elementary mathematics, as developing mathematical intuition. Intuition
cannot be taught, it has to be learned, so I found it necessary to provide them
with thought provoking, and sometimes silly questions designed to help
develop their intuitive skills, e.g. does this answer make sense? I will give
some examples in the context of the two primary topics mentioned above –
quantity and uncertainty.

Quantity: One aspect of innumeracy manifested in our society is a lack of

appreciation for the size of numbers and relationships between them.

Million/billion joke:
The famous Russian astronomer had just concluded her lecture on the life
cycle of stars like the sun by pointing out that in about five billion years, the
sun could be expected to become a red giant star, enveloping the orbit of the
earth in its interior. A question was asked a very shaken member of the
audience: “How long did you say it will be before this occurs?” Five billion
years, was the reply. “Whew!” The questioner breathed a sigh of relief. “I
thought you said five million years.”

Let me state some facts in approximate form, and then a little later I’ll
develop some of the ideas underlying the examples. You may find some of
these quite surprising.

1 Million seconds ≈ 11.5 days; 1 billion seconds ≈ 32 years. 1 trillion seconds

is about 32,000 years.

This means, in passing, that very roughly, everyone here over the age of
thirty has a heart that has beaten at least a billion times.

Some of us worry about the dangers of flying, but the number of people each
year in the US who die of smoking-related diseases is approximately
400,000. In terms of flying, this is the equivalent of three or four fully-laden
Jumbo jets crashing and killing all on board every day of the year!
And, by the way, one can reasonably estimate the number of cigarettes
smoked annually in this country as 1011 – a hundred billion – which is
probably accurate to within a factor of two or three either way. That’s the
same order of magnitude as the number of stars in our galaxy, by the way.

And the total volume of human blood in the world would cover Central
Park, N.Y. to a depth of about 22 feet. (Watching CSI New York and Law
and Order might lead us to conclude that most of that blood is there
already!) If one could fold a piece of paper 1/100th of an inch thick 32 times
– which one could not – it would reach a height of about 670 miles. That’s
compound interest for you! The number of piano tuners in Chicago is
probably around 100. How fast does your hair grow in mph? (10-8) How
many people are there with the last name Smith in the US? (About 3
million.) And so it goes on…

I once asked the following question on a test (this is not advanced

mathematics, remember, just applied arithmetic): a garden mole can travel
about 100 yards in about 8 hrs…what is its speed in km/sec? You wouldn’t
believe the answers I got! Five members of the class – future middle school
teachers by the way – estimated the mole’s average speed to be 300,000
km/sec; that’s about the speed of light! It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s
supermole! [About 3 × 10-6 km/sec.] (I also went one stage further and asked
them to calculate the speed of sound at sea level in furlongs per fortnight!
[About 1.6 million fpf]) On that same test I added the question: Loch Ness in
Scotland has a volume of about two cubic miles. Estimate how many one
gallon containers would be required to empty the Loch, and thus expose the
monster. The correct order of magnitude is about 1012: one trillion such
containers, or just one emptied a trillion times! Again, the answers I received
were very creative but mostly wrong. One answer stated that it could not be
done because the Loch was not land locked! The most common answer was
10-12: one trillionth of a bucket! And it was not merely a case of
inadvertently writing the reciprocal of the correct answer – these answers
were based on long strings of seemingly coherent arithmetic arguments!

My concern with the supermole and Loch Ness answers – other than the fact
that they were galactically wrong – was that the there seemed to be no
questioning of the answer – does this make sense, it seems awfully high (or
low, respectively)? Estimation is very important, because in the world
beyond university, almost every business and company relies on calculators
and computers for easy access to data, and for fast and accurate
computation. But such tools are only as good as the individuals using them,
and mistakes can occur – we are all prone to errors at times – so it’s a good
idea to have some idea of the numbers one expects. This is the classic “back
of the envelope” calculation! Of course, one can go to the other extreme, and
try to calculate something to such a high degree of accuracy that it becomes
meaningless: the average height of the American male is 5ft 10.4783068219
inches, for example (I made that up!).

I will finish this category- estimation – with a quote from Aristotle’s

writings. He wrote “It is the mark of an instructed mind to rest satisfied with
the degree of precision which the nature of the subject permits and not to
seek an exactness where only an approximation of the truth is possible.”

Uncertainty: the two key words here are data and chance, and the
mathematical fields that deal with them are statistics and probability
respectively. It is important to remember that data are not merely numbers,
but numbers within a context. The number 70.5 is meaningless by itself, but
in the context of height, it is the average height in inches of the American
male I made up before, rounded to the nearest half-inch.

Of course, data can be misused and taken out of context. You are all familiar
I am sure, with the quote from Benjamin Disraeli about “Lies, Damned Lies
and Statistics”. One of my favorite statements is from a source I have been
unable to find: “Some people use statistics like a drunken man uses a lamp-
post: for support rather than illumination.”
Here are some more examples of the misuse and abuse of statistics:

Rachel, Matthew and Lindsay joke. (Not intended as a slur on anyone from
China!)

A woman in Britain is giving birth…

A man was arrested today for carrying a bomb in a suitcase he intended to

bring on board a plane. When questioned, he reasoned that since the
likelihood of there being two bombs on board a plane is so small as to be
negligible, it was in the interests of safety that he was trying to bring his on
board.

And here are some true, but rather unhelpful statistical comments based on
the idea of “average” as arithmetic mean:
The average American has slightly fewer than two legs.

The average American has one testicle and one ovary (you can thank Paulos
for that!), although in light of the previous comment, I should correct that to
“almost one testicle and…”! In these instances the mode or even median
would have been a more appropriate average to use.

Although events since 9/11 have increased the risks of Americans and others
being kidnapped and killed abroad, I will quote from Paulos’ book
concerning the situation in 1985, about three years before his book was
published. In that year, 17 Americans were killed abroad by terrorists, but
about 26 million traveled abroad, so at that time about one individual in 1.6
million was killed. Annually, the chance of being fatally injured in a car
accident in this country is about 1 in 5300. The chance of being injured, but
not killed is of course correspondingly higher. Obviously fewer people travel
to some parts of the world since 9/11, and even excluding military deaths in
Iraq and Afghanistan, more Americans have become targets of terrorism, but
the original point remains the same: we need to balance probabilities.

This is all part of what we sometimes call critical thinking, which involves a
healthy skepticism about the numbers we hear about in the various media
outlets. Some examples – first in the form of another little joke.

Farmer Jones says to his nephew, a budding mathematician: “It’s a fact that
my brown cows always yield more milk than my black cows.” His nephew,
pencil at the ready, says “Fascinating! Give me more details.” “Oh,” says his
uncle, “I have more brown cows than black cows.”

Here’s a similar but more realistic example. Drivers over the age of 65 are
involved in more fatal car accidents than drivers aged 16 and 17. Does this
mean that younger drivers have a better driving record? Not at all – there are
many more drivers over 65 than at 16 and 17 combined. The per capita
fatality figures rather than the total number of fatal accidents in each
category is the appropriate measurement here. In fact, for the younger group
it is about three times higher than for the older group.

Another example of innumeracy is the confusion of causation with

correlation. Data exists demonstrating conclusively that children with bigger
feet spell better than those with smaller feet. Shall we apply to Educational
funding agencies to place foot stretchers in all elementary school
classrooms? Of course not! The correlation is not causal; children with
bigger feet tend to spell better because they’re usually older!

More innumeracy, this time based on results from improper sampling

methods leading to a biased survey: In 1975 Ann Landers conducted a
voluntary response survey (and therefore a non-scientific one), asking: “If
you had to do it over again, would you have children?”

Almost 70% of the nearly 10,000 respondents answered no. Many

accompanied their responses with heart-rending tales of cruelty inflicted on
them by their children. Fact: it is the nature of voluntary response to attract
people with strong feelings, especially negative ones. All faculty know that
from student evaluations! Ann Landers’ survey was obviously dealing with a
biased sample, because a nationwide random sample commissioned in
response to this found that 91% of parents would have children again.

I’d like to end this talk with three more examples illustrating some of the
dangers of jumping to conclusions before examining the data: one about
basketball, one about university admissions discrimination, and one about
AIDS testing.

Suppose that I had been born with some athletic ability and had grown a few
more inches along the way (upwards, that is!). And suppose that over a very
successful and long season I made about 70% of my free throws. At the end
of a tournament game I attempt five free throws and make only two. My fans
(who prior to that point number in the thousands, of course), put this down
to nervousness, which may well be the case; after all, my athletic
scholarship, my reputation, and perhaps even my life may be in jeopardy!
But actually, even on my top form of a 70% success rate, there is a
probability of about one in six of missing three or more shots. This is due
entirely to chance variation.

In the mid-1980s the ELISA test was introduced to screen donated blood for
the presence of AIDS antibodies. (The acronym stands for enzyme-linked
immunosorbent assay.) If such antibodies are present, the test is positive
98% of the time. If such antibodies are not present, the false positive rate is
about 7%. Question: If one in a thousand blood samples so screened contains
AIDS antibodies, then what percentage of positive results are false
positives?
Based on what is called conditional probability, the answer is that 98.6% of
positive results are false positives! Almost one 99 in every 100!

PSU (Psychotic State University) has several limited-enrollment courses, so

not all students who apply are guaranteed a place in the class. There are
complaints about sexual discrimination in the admissions process, which at a
glance, appear to be justified by clear numerical evidence (see slide). Of the
80 men who applied to such courses at PSU, 35 were admitted, which is
about a 44% admittance rate. But only 20 women out of the 60 who applied
were accepted, a 33% success rate approximately. Furthermore, this
difference is more than could be reasonably expected to occur by chance (it
could, but that is very unlikely). So: are men being favored over women?
(And has Larry Somers anything to do with it?) Cheap shot! PSU receives
some bad press about this in the local and regional newspapers, including the
Pavilion Pilot and the Stitchman Times. President Hunter of PSU, Hosanne
Hunter, is understandably concerned and asks Provost Tim Isengard to
investigate.

Tim does a thorough job and his investigation discloses that, in this instance,
men and women tended to apply for different courses. The organic
chemistry course is very rigorous, and of the 40 women who applied for it,
only 10 were accepted, so that’s a 25% success rate (See table). 20 men
applied for it, and only 5 were accepted, again a 25% success rate. So far
everything seems to be fine.

The only other limited-enrollment course offered by PSU is the history and
sociology of the TV comedy sitcom “Friends”. This is believed by most
students to be something of a “soft” option (but the professor disagrees). 60
men applied for it, and 30 were accepted, a 50% acceptance rate. 20 women
applied for it, and 10 were accepted, again, a 50% success rate.

Conclusion: neither admissions process, in this instance, discriminated

between men and women. A higher proportion of women applied for the
harder course and a higher proportion of men applied for the easier class.
This was hidden in the original data. Equity in each case appeared to
indicate the opposite when the cases were lumped together. An effect was
present – more men than women got into limited courses at PSU, but the
overall numbers did not show why the effect was present, until the Provost’s
investigation. This is similar to the AIDS test example: a large number of
false positives swamped the smaller number of true positives.
Moral of the story (and a suitable place to end my talk): appearances can be
deceiving, even when correctly using arithmetic and statistics, so extreme
care must be exercised in interpreting the data, especially when no
experimental trials have been conducted.

And more generally, to return to my story about the traveler and the old
shepherd in Devon, mathematics undergirds so much of the world around us
all, that in my view it behooves us to be very zealous about its power, beauty
and applicability when asked the common innumeracy-induced question:
what’s the point of learning mathematics?

Thank you for your time.

Appendix: Size - the Problem of Scale

Simply put, the problem of scale means: what happens as things get bigger?
Double the size of a cube: its surface area increases by a factor of 4 and its
volume, and hence weight increases by a factor of 8. It is straightforward
considerations like this that are important in the problem of scale, because
differences in size affect structure e.g. a large cube is relatively weaker than
a small cube, and King Kong, as a scaled-up gorilla, simply could not exist;
and so to maintain the same structural characteristics a change in size is
usually accomplished by a change in shape.

This helps to explain at a basic level why elephants are not shaped like
gigantic mice. The surface area of an object - you, me, or a snowball - is the
fundamental means by which the object interacts with the environment.
There is no other easy way for heat to get in or out, even for warm-blooded
creatures that generate their own heat from within (from food). If the surface
area to volume ratio is too small the animal must have a low enough
metabolic rate in warm climates to allow the heat generated to adequately
escape through the available surface area, or use some other means of
cooling. That is one reason why elephants (for whom L is large) have large
ears to act as radiators! If the animal is small, the surface area to volume
ratio is large, then in cold climates such an animal may lose heat too rapidly
to survive without compensating insulation. Other things being equal,
smaller creatures will avoid higher latitudes where larger ones fare better
(the rent is higher there as well).
We can make this statement: if land animals increased in size indefinitely
without change of shape (i.e. in a geometrically similar fashion), their
skeletons would be unable, eventually, to support them. Their weight would
increase faster than the ability of their bones to support them! Thus an
animal 3 times the size of another, and geometrically similar to it would be
33 = 27 times heavier, but only able to support 32 = 9 times the weight of the
smaller one. For King Kong, scaling up a 5 ft. tall gorilla to a height of 30 ft.
without change of proportion would increase his weight by a factor of 216,
but the strength of his bones to support that weight would only increase by a
factor of 36, so…

(1) King Kong, as portrayed in the movie, could not exist! (Sorry)

(2) Elephants cannot be large mice! (Their limbs are much thicker
relative to their torso).

[Table overleaf]
 Male Female
Count % Count %
Admit 35 44 20 33
Deny 45 56 40 67
Total 80 100 60 100

Organic Chemistry:

Male Female
Count % Count %
Admit 5 25 10 25
Deny 15 75 30 75

TV Comedy-Sitcom:

Male Female
Count % Count %
Admit 30 50 10 50
Deny 30 50 10 50