Any book subtitled Solving the World’s Problems on the Back of a Cocktail Napkin should include strategies for finding out how much farmland is required to generate ethanol to replace gasoline and how much the ocean surfaces would rise if the ice caps melted. Guesstimation succeeds in this respect. As a primer on approaching “order of magnitude” calculations with a wealth of valuable examples of the power of estimation, this book will help guide students toward fluency in this important component of numerical literacy.
Physicists affectionately refer to back-of-the-envelope approximations as Fermi problems because Enrico Fermi was so adept at assigning numbers to important problems, such as the strength of an atomic blast (after throwing a few pieces of paper into the air following the explosion), and curious problems, such as estimating the number of piano tuners in Chicago. Fermi problems can be challenging puzzles and powerful tools. The generations...
