Back of the Envelope
15th December 2008
David Friedman is always worth reading.
A physics professor my wife knows complains that few of his students have any idea of how to do plausibility calculations, how to figure out whether quantitative claims could be true. My wife suggests that it would be a good topic for a class in elementary school, since such calculations usually require nothing more than arithmetic and demonstrate one reason why arithmetic is useful. It occurs to me that it might also be a good topic for a book.