INFORMS Open Forum

We just had our INFORMS Book Club meeting to review "Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk" by Peter Bernstein. Our Book Club has been asked to post our reviews on books we read as part of Book Club. This book review is my opinion and I hope it is useful to you. My background includes operations research, probability, statistics, financial analysis, market research. Overall, I believe the book is very helpful and I'm glad we read it. Topics covered include the history of: risk management, utility theory, probability, statistics and other types of financial analysis. The author proceeds through history in a lively manner, touching upon developments as well as the people involved such as Gauss, Bayes, Arrow, Bernoulli, Newton, Galileo and Fibonacci. We even learn how the transition occurred from the Greco/Roman roman numerals to the use of true numerals for numbers. We learn more about the Normal Distribution, the Central Limit Theorem, the Law of Large Numbers, Regression Towards the Mean, the development of Utility Theory, The Random Walk, the Capital Asset Pricing Model and other topics. I have a few complaints: The PDF provided is not very useful and could have been a lot better. Also, the author sometimes gets bogged down in tedious calculations. Finally, he treated Pascal's Christianity unkindly, which, yes, did distract him from mathematics. Again, however, this is still a very worthwhile book. Being deep, and listening to the Audible version, it was very helpful to listen to the book a second time.