Knock on Wood: Luck, Chance, and the Meaning of Everything

Jeffrey S. Rosenthal

Oct 2018 · Sold by HarperCollins

About this ebook

Jeffrey S. Rosenthal, author of the bestseller Struck by Lightning: The Curious World of Probabilities, was born on Friday the thirteenth, a fact that he discovered long after he had become one of the world’s pre-eminent statisticians. Had he been living ignorantly and innocently under an unlucky cloud for all those years? Or is thirteen just another number? As a scientist and a man of reason, Rosenthal has long considered the value of luck, good and bad, seeking to measure chance and hope in formulas scratched out on chalkboards.

In Knock on Wood, with great humour and irreverence, Rosenthal divines the world of luck, fate and chance, putting his considerable scientific acumen to the test in deducing whether luck is real or the mere stuff of superstition.

 

About the author

JEFFREY S. ROSENTHAL is a professor of statistics at the University of Toronto. He received his BSc in mathematics, physics and computer science from U of T at the age of 20; his PhD in mathematics from Harvard University at the age of 24; and tenure at the age of 29. He has won the CRM-SSC Prize, the SSC Gold Medal and the COPSS Presidents’ Award (often referred to as the Nobel Prize of Statistics), and has received teaching awards from U of T and Harvard. Rosenthal is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. His first book, Struck by Lightning: The Curious World of Probabilities, was a national bestseller in Canada and was published in fourteen countries and ten languages. Visit Jeffrey S. Rosenthal online at probability.ca and on Twitter @ProbabilityProf. Despite being born on Friday the thirteenth, Rosenthal has led a very fortunate life.