The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives

Leonard Mlodinow

May 2008 · Sold by Vintage

About this ebook

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the classroom to the courtroom and from financial markets to supermarkets, an intriguing and illuminating look at how randomness, chance, and probability affect our daily lives that will intrigue, awe, and inspire.

“Mlodinow writes in a breezy style, interspersing probabilistic mind-benders with portraits of theorists.... The result is a readable crash course in randomness.” —The New York Times Book Review

With the born storyteller's command of narrative and imaginative approach, Leonard Mlodinow vividly demonstrates how our lives are profoundly informed by chance and randomness and how everything from wine ratings and corporate success to school grades and political polls are less reliable than we believe.

By showing us the true nature of chance and revealing the psychological illusions that cause us to misjudge the world around us, Mlodinow gives us the tools we need to make more informed decisions. From the classroom to the courtroom and from financial markets to supermarkets, Mlodinow's intriguing and illuminating look at how randomness, chance, and probability affect our daily lives will intrigue, awe, and inspire.

Ratings and reviews

This was a truly witty and insightful book. Firstly, the author has a great writing style that is engaging and humble. He is earnestly trying to share his ideas on randomness, statistics, probabilities and human behavior without sounding pedantic. Best of all, he throws in a lot of well-timed humor. I thoroughly enjoyed the learning journey shared by this book, and feel that I have learned more about my life and how it interacts with events around me. In fact, I've come to know more about how my own behavior is shaped by my desire to see non-existent patterns, and this has made me more circumspect in how I react immediately to life's events. In summary, a very enlightening and helpful book.

About the author

Leonard Mlodinow received his doctorate in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, was an Alexander von Humboldt fellow at the Max Planck Institute, and now teaches about randomness to future scientists at Caltech. Along the way he also wrote for the television series MacGyver and Star Trek: The Next Generation. His previous books include Euclid's Window: The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace, Feynman's Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life, and, with Stephen Hawking, A Briefer History of Time. He lives in South Pasadena, California.