Talk:Ronald Gould (mathematician)

On page 30 he says, "Odds makers try to predict which football team will win and by how much (the spread)". This is incorrect. The line, the spread, and the odds are all measures of gamblers' sentiment. They are only tangentially related to the outcome of the game used to let bettors bet. They are betting on each others' intelligence and luck. See Keynes' The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.

More accurately, it is gamblers betting on other gamblers' opinions about other gamblers' opinions'... in infinite regress. As with most infinite series, the limit value is reached pretty quickly. Unlike with most arithmetical or geometric series, the values change all the time, and are in flux right up until pay-off. This is not necessarily the same as any value mooted to that point. On Sudoku he writes "There are a couple of fundamental strategies people use in trying to complete a Sudoku puzzle." (page 242.) I won't bother with his long, boring, and inaccurate statement of what he claims those "fundamental strategies" are. What he calls "fundamental strategies" are simply off-the-cuff hacks, possibly his. I and many other people only use his tiresome methods now and then as we go along.

My method, and it has some claim on being fundamental, is to look at the numbers in one 3x3 square one by one, and ask myself about each one "What information does it give me when I match it up with all its siblings, a 7 with all the other 7's for instance?" As this question lets me fill in numbers (or rather glyphs, because no numerical values are involved), I ask the same question of the one I have just filled in.

Moving from one 3x3 sub-grid to the next this usually completes the puzzle pretty quickly. Only rarely does guessing and following up the consequences of each guess, "colored pencil Sudoku," become necessary.

I am sure there other methods besides my own, which is pretty good, and Professor Gould's, which may very well suit him. There must be, because there are Sudoku players who are far faster and more accurate than me. These are my first two dips into the content of the book, and so far the good professor is batting .000. On the other hand, the Table of Contents is very promising, and contains a lot of attractive maths, so I shall now read the rest of it.

The stuff he has on poker is only gradeschool combinations and permutations, so that's useless, too.

For anybody interested in poker praxis I like the excellent Action Dan Harrington, and shall be studying him for a while. For both theory and psychology Mike Caro is also excellent. I have found no errors in Caro yet, and expect to find very few if any. At the table, of course, trust nothing he says, not even the clothing and the haircut. I wish all gamblers and students of mathematics well, but only the latter should read this book. -dlj.

David Lloyd-Jones (talk) 18:54, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

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I took the photo at a mathematics conference that I co-organize, and that Gould spoke at. (The article was previously without photo.) I'm not otherwise closely connected, and believe that I can edit without COI. Russ Woodroofe (talk) 17:12, 7 November 2019 (UTC)