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Numeracy
Know of a resource missing from this page? Let us know... 

Basic numeracy is an essential requirement for critical thinking. As John Allen Paulos said, "mathematics is too important to be left to the mathematicians."  A component of numeracy, understanding of statistics and probability, is so crucial and so neglected that it has its own page.

John Allen Paulos
Often credited with inventing the term "Innumeracy," JAP is the author of the famous book of that name as well as other many other excellent works in this general area.  This is this personal website; lots of good stuff here!  See also his column Who's Counting. [28 Apr 02]

innumeracy.com
This a pretty large list of links, many of which appear to be good quality. Normally I don't link to such sites from CTOTW, but, as mentioned above, I haven't yet researched this topic properly. innumeracy.com is not a bad place to start your own search, even though it suffers from the same severe problems as most link lists on the web: (a) it does very little organising of the links, and (b) it does not provide any useful annotation, so it is hard to tell whether you want to visit a linked site without actually visiting it. [28 Apr 02]

Who's Counting by John Allen Paulos and ABCNEWS.com
An excellent collection of short newspaper columns on mathematics, often describing in amusing ways how thinking can go wrong. [28 Apr 02]

Best Practices for Understanding Quantitative Data by Jonathan G. Koomey
Adapted from Koomey's excellent book Turning Numbers into Knowledge. "When dealing with quantitative data, business analysts must be skeptical, think critically, and assume nothing." [28 Feb 06]

Zero in Four Dimensions
Fascinating site. "The purpose of this site is to raise students and teachers awareness of issues in working with zero and other numbers. Imprecise mathematical thinking is by no means unknown; however, we need to think more clearly if we are to keep out of confusions." [28 Apr 02]

 

Last updated: 28 Feb 2006