Plot: John Allen Paulos, professor of mathematics at Temple University, Philadelphia, is an author, public speaker, and columnist for ABCNews and the Guardian. His writings include Innumeracy, A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, Once Upon a Number, A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market and scholarly papers on probability, logic, and the philosophy of science as well as OpEds, book reviews, and articles in publications from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, Discover, The American Scholar, and the London Review of Books