Street-Fighting Mathematics is a book

From the Chronicle of Higher Education: The Gospel of Well-Educated Guessing, on Sanjoy Mahajan's Street-Fighting Mathematics. (Previously: here, and here.) It's now a real book!


Here's a calculation I hadn't heard of before, and don't actually know the details of:

They were both right, in a sense: some of the calculations he pulls off have a hint of Houdini. For instance, he can start with two paper cones, to find the relation between drag force and velocity, and—believe it or not—arrive at the cost of a round-trip plane ticket from New York to Los Angeles. He works out the problem in a blur of equations, remarking that a gram of gasoline and a gram of fat contain the same amount of energy, that drag force is proportional to velocity squared, and so on. The number he arrives at ($700) isn't the cheapest deal out there, but it's roughly right.

I've recently priced PHL-(SFO/OAK) flights, and this is roughly right. (And this uses chemistry, which is awesome because I was a chemist in a former life. Gasoline and fat are both basically long chains of carbon atoms.) The article tells of other similar party tricks. It would be nice to see some details, but the Chronicle seems to pitch itself at a humanities-ish audience.

Fermi problems

Here's a quiz full of Fermi problems (like "how many people are airborne over the US at any moment?") and an article by Natalie Angier in today's New York Times, in which she suggests that some basic quantitative reasoning skills wouldn't kill people. The article was inspired by a recent book of such problems, Guesstimation: Solving the World's Problems on the Back of a Cocktail Napkin, by John Adam and Lawrence Weinstein. Adam also has a forthcoming book entitled A Mathematical Nature Walk which may be interesting.