William Poundstone

"From Adam Smith through John Maynard Keynes, economics had been mostly talk. At Harvard economics was talk. At MIT, Samuelson made it math."

"Expectation is a statistical fiction, like having 2.5 children."

"The engine driving the Kelly system is the "law of large numbers." In a 1713 treatise on probability, Swiss mathematician Jakob Bernoulli propounded a law that has been misunderstood by gamblers ever …"

"Samuelson, however, hedged his personal bets - by putting some of his own money in Berkshire Hathaway."

"The more improbable the message, the less "compressible" it is, and the more bandwidth it requires. This is Shannon's point: the essence is its improbability."

"There were many at Bell Labs and MIT who compared Shannon's insight to Einstein's. Others found that comparison unfair - unfair to Shannon."

"Paradox is thus a much deeper and universal concept than the ancients would have dreamed. Rather than an oddity, it is a mainstay of the philosophy of science."

"For reasons mathematical, psychological, and sociological, it is a good idea to use a money management system that is relatively forgiving of estimation errors."