Guesstimation

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1. thewanderer1983Jul 2025
   You can actually estimate this pretty well with only your brain and basic math. Example 1 in Guesstimation by Lawrence Weinstein and John Adams, would work for this problem. The problem is about estimating the height of all lottery tickets in a lottery. Another book called The art of Insight in Science and Engineering by Sanjoy Mahajan has this problem (1.3) but its with a suitcase filled with $100 bills.
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2. terminalbraidDec 2024
   MIT OCW has a free textbook "The Art of Insight in Science and Engineering: Mastering Complexity", which I usually point folks to on the subject of estimating physical systems. I think this is a real gem. Another work of the author is referenced at the bottom of the article. I'll also vouch for the referenced Guesstimation (though I hate the title).

   https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/res-6-011-the-art-of-insight-in-...

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3. rramadassDec 2024
   There is also Guesstimation 2.0 by the same authors which is a sequel to Guesstimation and is just as good.

   Also see Maths on the Back of an Envelope: Clever ways to (roughly) calculate anything. by Rob Eastaway - https://aperiodical.com/2019/11/review-maths-on-the-back-of-...

   Related is How to Read Numbers: A Guide to Statistics in the News (and Knowing When to Trust Them) by Tom Chivers and David Chivers - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_Numbers

   Finally, the old Soviet books by Yakov Perelman (https://mirtitles.org/?s=Yakov+Perelman) named Physics for Entertainment, Mathematics for Fun etc. also fall under the same category and are a good read.

   Bonus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-of-the-envelope_calculati... Follow other links like "Guesstimate" from the "See also" section.

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4. palashkulshJun 2024
   Guesstimation is also a good read
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5. palashkulshAug 2022
   Thanks for the suggestion. will definitely give it a try. I really liked guesstimation too. https://www.amazon.in/Guesstimation-Solving-World%60s-Proble...
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6. jostylrJan 2022
   I recommend making sure you are good with Guesstimation to start (The book of that name by Weinstein and Adams). Be sure to create your own questions and attempt to answer them. Watch some TED talks and try to use mathematical skepticism to criticize them. Doing all this should make you comfortable using mathematics as a tool. Once you are in that frame of mind, you can explore and have fun with the other topics as ably listed in the other comments on this page. Think of math as a faithful toolkit to explore the world. Once you start to try to describe the world in mathematical language, the more proper tools of mathematics will make much more sense.

   Also, keep in mind that pretending things are lines is really useful. See the secant method.

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