The Trinity test occurred on a calm morning. Enrico Fermi, one of the observers, began dropping bits of paper about 40 seconds after the explosion; pieces in the
air when the blast wave arrived were deflected by about 2.5 meters. From this crude measurement, Fermi estimated the bomb’s yield to be ten kilotons; he was
accurate within a factor of two. Although Street-Fighting Mathematics does not address the problem of estimating bomb yields, it gives us a reasonably generic
toolbox for generating quantitative estimates from a few facts, a lot of intuition, and impressively little calculus. As one of the reviews on Amazon says, this
book makes us smarter.
Street-Fighting Mathematics —
The title refers to the fact that in a street fight, it’s better to have a quick and dirty answer than to stand there thinking about the right thing to do - is based
on the premise that we can and should use rapid estimation techniques to get rough answers to difficult problems. There are good reasons for preferring estimation
over rigorous methods: the answer is arrived at quickly, the full set of input data may not be needed, and messy calculus-based or numerical techniques can often be
avoided. Perhaps more important, by avoiding a descent into difficult symbol pushing, a greater understanding of the problem’s essentials can sometimes be gained
and a valuable independent check on rigorous — and often more error prone — methods is obtained.
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