Watch out Martin Lewis, did you know Isaac Newton—who was even born on 25th December—can save you money on wrapping paper? As well as giving equations for gravity, his laws of motion and calculus could reap real rewards. It’s that time of year for the sinking feeling when you delve into the Christmas chocolate selection box and, as if by magic, pull out The One Which Nobody Likes. Last month brought the controversial news that Bounty chocolates have been excluded from a special edition of Celebrations, so that’s one less choc to worry about, but how exactly do the odds stand against us? According to the publisher, Numbercrunch equips readers with the mathematical tools and thinking to understand the myriad data all around us.

An excellent, straightforward introduction to usefulness of numbers, which gets to the heart of why maths is so important to all of us. * David Sumpter, author of 'The Ten Equations that Rule the World' * Professor Johnson said, "Even if you've grown out of advent calendars, it's impossible to escape the importance of numbers at Christmas. For instance, if you get the timings wrong on defrosting your turkey or miscount the number of places needed at the dinner table, it's likely to cause some serious festive frustration. But there are also some lesser-known and rather intriguing ways math can make your celebrations a little merrier." Lucid and entertaining. With barely an equation in sight, Numbercrunch makes a passionate case for how just a little bit more numeracy could help us all' - Tom Whipple, The Times'The perfect introduction to the power of mathematics - fluent, friendly and practical' - Tim Harford, bestselling author of How to Make the World Add UpIn our hyper-modern world, we are bombarded with more facts, stats and information than ever before. No Christmas is complete without a rootin’-tootin’ singalong of The Twelve Days of Christmas. Well done if you can remember all the lyrics but top marks are reserved for those who know the secret significance of the number of presents received each day. The budget figures above are only rough partly because there is little to be gained by adding more detail. For instance, using the mid-2021 Office for National Statistics mid-2021 UK population figure of 67,026,292, my million-pound item actually costs us 1.4919518p each. However, this would probably not change your opinions about value for money! Additionally, it would be reasonable to consider the accuracy of that quoted population figure. At best, it might be more than 18 months out of date, but even then the last few digits were questionable, given missing and inaccurate census responses, an uncertain number of births and deaths on the day itself and so on.A fine and valuable read. Johnson applies careful analysis and great common sense to an extraordinary range of applications of mathematical ideas, from football to filter bubbles - explaining formal ideas with minimum technicalities, and weighing their relevance to the real world. * David Spiegelhalter, author of 'The Art of Statistics' * It's that time of year for the sinking feeling when you delve into the Christmas chocolate selection box and, as if by magic, pull out The One Which Nobody Likes. Last month brought the controversial news that Bounty chocolates have been excluded from a special edition of Celebrations, so that's one less choc to worry about, but how exactly do the odds stand against us? Journeying through three sections - Randomness, Structure, and Information - we meet a host of brilliant minds, such Alan Turing, Enrico Fermi and Claude Shannon, and are equipped with the tools to cut through the noise all around us - from the Law of Large Numbers to Entropy to Brownian Motion. So, if you want to save on wrapping paper, you should look for presents that are close to cubes—in shape that is, not sugar cubes though they might go down well with Santa's reindeer. That's another reason not to forget the Chocolate Orange—it should cost you less to wrap than a thin flat bar with the same amount of chocolate inside. Similarly, the result of a false positive Covid test (someone wrongly isolating and potentially losing income) and a false negative (someone wrongly being given a clean bill of health and potentially infecting more people) were very different. In that sense, while we seek to balance the overall effect of different kinds of errors, it is important to remember that the outcomes associated with each may not be the same.

Lucid and entertaining. With barely an equation in sight, Numbercrunch makes a passionate case for how just a little bit more numeracy could help us all. Lucid and entertaining. With barely an equation in sight, Numbercrunch makes a passionate case for how just a little bit more numeracy could help us all. * Tom Whipple, Science Editor, 'The Times' * Oliver Johnson reveals how mathematical thinking can help us understand the myriad data all around us. Professor Johnson said: “Even if you’ve grown out of advent calendars, it’s impossible to escape the importance of numbers at Christmas. For instance, if you get the timings wrong on defrosting your turkey or miscount the number of places needed at the dinner table, it’s likely to cause some serious festive frustration. But there are also some lesser-known and rather intriguing ways maths can make your celebrations a little merrier.”Lucid and entertaining. With barely an equation in sight, Numbercrunch makes a passionate case for how just a little bit more numeracy could help us all'

Regarded as ‘the perfect introduction to the power of mathematics – fluent, friendly and practical’ by Tom Harford,author of How to Make the World Add Up.David Spiegelhalter, author o f The Art of Statisticsalso referred to it as ‘A fine and valuable read. Johnson applies careful analysis and great common sense to an extraordinary range of applications of mathematical ideas, from football to filter bubbles – explaining formal ideas with minimum technicalities, and weighing their relevance to the real world.'No Christmas is complete without a rootin'-tootin' singalong of The Twelve Days of Christmas. Well done if you can remember all the lyrics but top marks are reserved for those who know the secret significance of the number of presents received each day.

While there is uncertainty about the potential for bird flu to infect humans, investing in new vaccines now could avoid the ruinous cost of another pandemic. Photograph: Ian Forsyth/Getty Images A fine and valuable read. Johnson applies careful analysis and great common sense to an extraordinary range of applications of mathematical ideas, from football to filter bubbles - explaining formal ideas with minimum technicalities, and weighing their relevance to the real world. Similarly, there will be bare patches, just by random chance. In the same way, placing different coloured baubles randomly will tend to lead to two or three baubles of the same colour close together more often than we’d like. That means in fact, the best way to decorate your tree might be using a so-called quasi-random strategy, which lies somewhere between the very random and very structured extremes, and can be more pleasing on the eye.” Professor Johnson said: “It is extremely hard to plan the most efficient route to visit a large collection of places – a challenge often referred to as the Travelling Salesman Problem. The largest case of this issue currently solved by humans had 85,900 places to visit, which took an extraordinary 136 years’ worth of computing power.

Trigonometree

Heligo Books, the business and smart-thinking imprint of Bonnier Books UK, has signed a “riveting, revelatory and relevant” new pop-maths book by mathematician Oliver Johnson. So here are his top six numerical insights, shedding new light on the festive season and hopefully giving you some handy pointers on how to make them work to your advantage. Professor Johnson explained, "While it may be powerless to sweeten the pill, math can certainly help you understand what's going on. For example, what are the chances that the last chocolate left in the box is a nasty one? It's actually very simple: if our box has 24 nice chocolates and 6 nasty ones, there's a simple way to see the likelihood of the last one being nasty is 6/30, or 20%. That's the same chance that the first one is nasty, because you could imagine randomly pulling out all the chocolates and putting them in a long line—and then deciding which end of the line to start eating from. To whet your appetite for his wizardry, Professor Johnson has turned his mathematical mindset to the equally challenging problem of number crunching Christmas.