Professor Kit Yates, Professor of Mathematical Biology and Public Engagement, has released a new book, You Don’t Know What You’re M ss ng, which explores the surprising ways in which missing information influences how we see, think and make decisions in everyday life.

Blending mathematics, psychology and real‑world case studies, the book argues that many of our most confident conclusions are built on incomplete evidence.

Yates introduces three different kinds of “missingness”: intrinsic missingness, where our own brains filter and fill in gaps in perception; extrinsic missingness, where information is distorted or filtered before it reaches us, for example through biased surveys or selective reporting; and constructive missingness, where the absence of something can itself be a crucial clue.

Through stories ranging from aviation disasters and medical diagnosis to polling failures and everyday misjudgements, the book shows how easy it is to be misled by what we don’t see — and how to think more clearly about what might be missing.

Kit said: “When I’m talking about missingness, I’m not talking about misplacing your phone or losing your wallet. What I mean by missingness is the idea that the information we use to understand the world is incomplete – it contains gaps – and that those gaps are important.

"The book is designed to help readers appreciate how our senses filter things out or fill them in, and the ways in which information is lost, biased, suppressed, or compressed before it even reaches us.

"When we understand that, we can start to fight back and use missingness in a constructive way to help us get a more complete picture of the world.

"In this context, the worst problem we have is that we look at the world and think we are seeing all there is to see. We don’t realise that the picture our senses paint for us is incomplete, so we don’t know to look out for the gaps that might have been papered over.

"My hope for this book is that, at the very least, it makes readers aware of what they are missing.”

Kit's research at Bath demonstrates that mathematics can be used to describe all sorts of real-world phenomena: from embryo formation to locust swarming and from sleeping sickness to egg-shell patterning. He is particularly interested in the role that randomness plays in Biology.

Along side his academic position, Kit is an author and science communicator. His first book, “The Maths of Life and Death“, was published in 2019 and has since been translated into 25 languages. His second book “How to Expect the Unexpected” was published in 2023. His third book, “You Don’t Know What You’re Missing” was published in June 2026.

Kit also writes a regular piece for the Independent, the Guardian, Live Science and on his substack on mathematics in the real world.