Guesstimation: Solving the World's Problems on the Back of a Cocktail Napkin |  | Authors: Lawrence Weinstein, John A. Adam
Publisher: Princeton University Press
List Price: $19.95
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Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 30680
Media: Paperback
Pages: 320
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 4.5 x 0.9
ISBN: 0691129495
Dewey Decimal Number: 519.544
EAN: 9780691129495
ASIN: 0691129495
Publication Date: April 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Guesstimation is a book that unlocks the power of approximation--it's popular mathematics rounded to the nearest power of ten! The ability to estimate is an important skill in daily life. More and more leading businesses today use estimation questions in interviews to test applicants' abilities to think on their feet. Guesstimation enables anyone with basic math and science skills to estimate virtually anything--quickly--using plausible assumptions and elementary arithmetic. Lawrence Weinstein and John Adam present an eclectic array of estimation problems that range from devilishly simple to quite sophisticated and from serious real-world concerns to downright silly ones. How long would it take a running faucet to fill the inverted dome of the Capitol? What is the total length of all the pickles consumed in the US in one year? What are the relative merits of internal-combustion and electric cars, of coal and nuclear energy? The problems are marvelously diverse, yet the skills to solve them are the same. The authors show how easy it is to derive useful ballpark estimates by breaking complex problems into simpler, more manageable ones--and how there can be many paths to the right answer. The book is written in a question-and-answer format with lots of hints along the way. It includes a handy appendix summarizing the few formulas and basic science concepts needed, and its small size and French-fold design make it conveniently portable. Illustrated with humorous pen-and-ink sketches, Guesstimation will delight popular-math enthusiasts and is ideal for the classroom.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 9
 Great book! September 18, 2009
A. KEITH (Albuquerque, NM)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I looked at the description of this book and it peaked my interest. I debated for a while whether it would really be as interesting as the table of contents and description implied. I finally decided that the simplest solution was to just go ahead and buy and take the chance. I was not only gratified that it met my expectations created by the description and table of contents...but the writing was unexpectedly very engaging. It turned out to be a great book and I'm glad I bought it. I would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in the topic.
 A bit underwhelming June 16, 2009
S. Matthews (Mainz, Germany)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I was somehow expecting to like this book more. And even having said that, I am not sure whether three stars is a little mean, since I did learn real stuff from it, and anything from which you learn real stuff is better than average.
Why do I not like it better? First, the style the authors have decided to adopt, of flippant, cheerful informality ('hey, yay, who would have believed that', 'that is a _really_ big number', 'Gravity sucks!'), that seems to be aimed at frat-boy undergraduate physics nerds - a set of very small cardinality, I would have thought. The effect, at least for me, is the prose equivalent of someone dragging nails down a blackboard. Second, the examples are a bit samey - you do not need to read a lot of them to get the general idea. Third, the examples are very disjointed: question, hints, workout; question, hints, workout, question...
This is all very critical, and I should emphasise that I _did_ learn some useful tips about how to think about certain problems, esp. in the more 'physics-y' questions that come up later; i.e. the more authentically Fermi questions. If you don't mind the prose, you might easily give this a four. Otherwise, you might be better advised to track down Sanjoy Mahajan's work in progress (the name of which escapes me at the moment), which looks like it will be a more serious, and structured, attempt to explore the same sorts of methods.
guesstimation review March 20, 2009
Francis Robinson
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
a great addition to any intro physics course - training students to solve these type of problems provides them with a really useful quantitative skill that can be applied to many types of real world problems.
Delicious book November 29, 2008
Sergio N. Sato (Guarulhos, SP, Brazil)
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
Delicious book of being read and precious as for the information that are contained in him.
A thought exercise, of reflection, more than a mathematical exercise.
I recommend for all those that appreciate the world in that you live, but that cannot leave of looking it with critic.
Use the skills you have November 4, 2008
wiredweird (Earth, or somewhere nearby)
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
If you can do basic arithmetic with one-digit numbers - add, subtract, multiply, divide - you can be a math genius. Maybe not genius, but you can still blow the doors off most people, and build up a healthy amount of BS-proofing, just by learning how to apply the skills you already have. This book offers dozens of worked examples, using pretty much just the math you learned by sixth grade.
Weinstein and Adam chose a format that's easy to pick up and thumb through. They present each poser on one page, with hints to help you get started. A few extra facts "to hang things on" appear at the back of the book: the sun is about 10^11 meters away, a billion seconds is about 30 years, things like that. Then, the next page or two after the problem works out its answer, often more than one way.
For example: could we create a human chain from Earth to the sun? Well, the sun is about 10^11 meters away, and a person is about 10^0 meters from fingertip to fingertip with arms stretched out. (For back-of-the-envelope purposes, you can often skip the leading digits of numbers.) So, the distance from earth to sun is about 10^11 people-widths, but the Earth's human population is just under 10^10. Answer: We'd certainly come up short.
Some questions, like that one, are silly factoids. Others have more pressing social importance. How much funding does a subsidized school lunch program need per year? How many acres of farmland would it take to fuel your car with ethanol? How much landfill area does your town need for the next decade? When political special interests start throwing numbers around to answer these questions, are they lying to you? Even if you don't have exact numbers to work with, the way you get the answer is what matters, and you know exactly what assumptions you've made. Then, when you get more facts, you can refine your answer.
You don't have to be a nerd to command a lot of nerd power. Grade-school arithmetic (which the authors review), a few basic facts, and a bucket of common sense go a long way. This book, with its puzzle-solving format, can help you develop that skill.
-- wiredweird
Showing reviews 1-5 of 9
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