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Math Sense

A friend forwarded me a TED talk by Clio Cresswell after hearing me praise the Eugenia Cheng's book I had read recently. The talk was entertaining and made me want to read the book itself - Mathematics and Sex. It's definitely not my kind of book - the pace is too choppy, there are too many ideas competing for attention and none seriously delve into either of the subjects referenced in the title of the book. 

If you were looking to be edified one way or the other you will be disappointed. If you expected to understand how math drives our primal instincts or perhaps predict our likelihood to find and keep love in our lives, you will come up short. That said, it makes for an easy and entertaining read. 

The math people in my life would find such writing ridiculous but for folks like me who don't have advanced math degrees, it could be amusing - for instance this bit about the curse of dimensionality as manifested by increasing the number of questions people are asked on a dating site to help facilitate a good match:

But, here is my second thing: this all works until we’re confronted with the curse of dimensionality. It turns out the more questions there are, or in other words the more dimensions you take into consideration, the harder it can be to find a concept of similarity that makes sense. Why? Because all calculated differences can end up being around the same number. The difference between the differences can be so small that how different you are to someone or similar to them becomes open to many interpretation

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