Description: George G. Szpiro offers an engaging and witty tour of what we can learn from ignorance. In a series of fast-paced chapters, he unravels problems ranging across science, mathematics, law, economics, politics, religion, psychology, and philosophy.
Brief description: George Szpiro (Ph.D., mathematical economics and finance, Hebrew University) has for the past thirty years worked as correspondent of the Swiss daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung, which has a readership of 500k. He is the author of Kepler's Conjecture (John Wiley, 2003), Numbers Rule (Princeton University Press, 2010) and Pricing the Future (Basic Books 2011), among others.
Review Quotes: Ignorance has become a hip topic in academia and beyond. George G. Szpiro's book masterfully weaves together different aspects of this trend by considering the flip side of knowledge from everyday perspectives, that is, the normalcy of nonknowledge, intentionally or not, in basically all areas of life. By so doing, Szpiro detects sixty "normal" instances of ignorance, no less. If you truly want to know about not knowing, then this is the book to read.--Matthias Gross, author of Ignorance and Surprise: Science, Society, and Ecological Design