Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

nate silver
Nate Silver from Wikimedia Commons

Nate Silver is a statistician. On election day his blog Five Thirty Eight at The New York Times accounted for 20% of all the traffic at the newspaper. That’s because Nate Silver had been standing up for his statistical analysis of the voting trend numbers and predicting Obama’s win for days before election day.

Keep in mind we’re talking about a mathematician here. But his name was all over Twitter and the news because he knows how to crunch numbers.

So here’s to Nate Silver. May his name become an inspiration to young people who are thinking about a career in some branch of mathematics.