Daniel Gilbert, he of the best-selling books on happiness and psychology, writes in the NYTimes on ‘magic numbers’.
[Magic Numbers
Gilbert uses his own recent experience in a hospital emergency room to take a look at numbers with ‘magical’ properties. He starts by asking why so many antibiotic drug treatments take seven to ten days (is seven more effective than five, 10 more effective than 11?).
Excuse the awful pun, but a post from Deb’s Math blog (new arrival in the Whizz blogroll, at right) pointed out the vogue for decent statisticians and mathematicians in the top companies.
She points to the recent New York Times piece ‘For Today’s Graduates, Just One word – Statistics‘, which quotes Peter Orzsag, White House economics honcho:
“Robust, unbiased data are the first step toward addressing our long-term economic needs and key policy priorities,”
This is no bad thing, and his attitude reflects the need at corporations to have expert number-crunchers on board. As Carrie Grimes, a statistics expert and analyst at Google, points out:
“Even an improvement of a percent or two can be huge, when you do things over the millions and billions of times we do things at Google,”
At a somewhat smaller level, we’ve found the benefits in good statistical analysis of the behavior of our tens of thousands of Math-Whizz students. Some of this research is summarized on our Math-Whizz Research Page.
In any case, we’d hope that our online math tutor can help get children started with elementary statistics in particular, and math in general.
Stats is one of the subjects that most commonly trips up adults, and knowing good from bad statistics is important for weeding out honest information from that which has been expelled from the fundament of a particular male bovine ruminant.
Welcome to the Whizz Education (US) Math Blog!
Come here for all things Math (NOT ‘Maths’!) and education, and get a scattering of opinions, cute animal pictures and mental ramblings from the Whizz Education team into the bargain.
To get you started with the US Whizz Blog, why not wander over to the NYTimes opinion pages, where top science writer Olivia Judson gives over her weekly blog posts to Steven Strogatz, professor of applied mathematics at Cornell University.
His first piece is titled ‘Math And the City’. Enjoy!
