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I came across this New York Times op-ed article from 1989 written by John Allen Paulos and thought it was especially relevant today. How much is innumeracy effecting the world today? Is it something that should be eliminated, like illiteracy? Or is a certain level of innumeracy to be expected? I included the Taylor Series table as an example of mathematics that some know and many do not. Should all be expected to understand Taylor Series? What level of mathematics qualifies someone as innumerate? Here is the op-ed piece...
THE ODDS ARE YOU'RE INNUMERATE
 Innumeracy, the mathematical analogue of functional illiteracy, afflicts far too many literate people, even widely read and articulate men and women who might cringe if words such as ''imply'' and ''infer'' were confused. They generally react without a trace of embarrassment, however, to even the most egregious numerical solecisms. Once I was at a gathering of writers in which much was being made of the difference between ''continually'' and ''continuously.'' Later that evening, as we were watching the news (another measure of how enjoyable the occasion was), the television meteorologist announced that there was a 50 percent chance of rain for Saturday and a 50 percent chance for Sunday as well, and concluded that there was therefore a 100 percent chance of rain that weekend. I grant the mistake was not hilarious, but no one even smiled. The recent ''Mathematics Report Card'' released by the Educational Testing Service indicates that more than weather reports are at risk. The rampant innumeracy of our high school students and of the educated public in general is appalling, and since this innumeracy can and does lead to muddled personal decisions, misinformed governmental policies and an increased susceptibility to pseudosciences of all kinds, it's not something that can be easily ignored.
I'm not primarily concerned with esoteric mathematics here, only with some feel for numbers and probabilities, some ability to estimate answers to the ubiquitous questions: How many? How likely? With megaton warheads (equivalent in explosive power to a million tons, or two billion pounds, of TNT) and trillion-dollar budgets a reality, people should have a visceral reaction to the difference between a million, a billion and a trillion. (It helps to note that a million seconds takes less than 12 days to tick by, while a billion seconds requires approximately 32 years, and 32,000 years must pass for a trillion seconds to elapse). They needn't be aware of how fast human hair grows, expressed in miles per hour, or of how many basketballs would fit in the Grand Canyon, but they ought to know roughly the population of the United States, the percentage of the world's population that is Chinese, the distance from New York City to Los Angeles, the odds of winning their state lottery and a host of other common magnitudes. Without a grasp of such basic numbers, just to cite one example, it is impossible to appreciate the silliness of canceling a European trip because of fear of terrorists. In 1985 when, out of the 28 million Americans who traveled abroad, 17 were killed by terrorists, you were almost 25 times as likely to choke to death (one chance in 68,000), about 300 times as likely to die in a car crash (one chance in 5,300) and nearly 2,000 times as likely to die from the effects of smoking (one chance in 800, the equivalent of three fully loaded jumbo jets crashing each and every day of the year).
Still, what do numbers, probabilities and mathematics in general have to do with books and literature? A couple of minor points first. In addition to the usual reasons for innumeracy, avid readers of fiction sometimes have an extra vulnerability to numerical myopia. Their habit of reading about individuals in extreme and dramatic circumstances may exacerbate the natural tendency we all have to give considerably more weight to unlikely but gripping events than we do to more mundane ones. Novels, after all, must be novel, and if, as Tolstoy's chestnut says, all happy families are the same, it's not surprising that the premises of most stories are biased toward the unusual, the special and the rare. (Soft news reports evince this same bias. Willie Horton, the furloughed murderer, seemed to receive more attention than did a decline in the Massachusetts crime rate; likewise, three stranded whales in Alaska may have received more notice than the famine in the Sudan.) Specific instances of quantitative inaccuracy in works of fiction are common, but frequently can be attributed to the characters rather than to the author, or they can be interpreted as having been inserted for effect. These deliberate exaggerations occur in books as dissimilar as Rabelais's ''Gargantua and Pantagruel'' and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's ''One Hundred Years of Solitude,'' and are certainly nothing to get indignant about. My suspicion, however, is that the allusive, metaphoric use of language in literature, so at odds with its more literal use in scientific and mathematical contexts, hides many unintentional clinkers as well.
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Re: How Big An Issue Is Innumeracy?
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