The battle of Midway was a historic turning point for the US during World War II. Joe Rochefort was the officer in charge of Station Hypo, a group of hand-picked Navy cryptographers tasked with breaking the Japanese Navy cipher. The machine the Japanese used was the JN-25. Unlike the British Bletchley Park cryptographers trying to [...]...

Last month I wrote: Computer scientists are often brilliant but they can be unfamiliar with what is done in the worlds of data collection and analysis. This goes the other way too: statisticians such as myself can look pretty awkward, reinventing (or failing to reinvent) various wheels when we write computer programs or, even worse, [...]...

After our discussion of the sad case of Darrell Huff, the celebrated “How to Lie with Statistics” guy who had a lucrative side career disparaging the link between smoking and cancer, I was motivated to follow John Mashey’s recommendation and read the book, Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition, [...]...

Horace Mitchell, director of the NASA Scientific Visualization Studio discusses the process behind their visualization that shows estimated surface currents …...

There’s a classic problem in behavioral economics known as the “Linda problem.” Here’s the question that was asked in an experiment. See if you can come up with the correct answer. Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of [...]...

The myth that mathematical theorems suddenly come together in the most elegant and smooth proofs will be busted at an upcoming lecture....

Or: how stupid am I? Siegbert Tarrasch was a very strong player and teacher of chess in the late 19th century and into the early 20th century. He coined the term chess blindness—the failure of a chess player to make a normally obvious move or to see a normally obvious threat. He also stated the [...]...

From The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking:Calculus may hold a world’s record for how far an idea can be pushed. Leibniz published the first article on calculus in 1684, an essay that was a mere 6 pages long. Newton and Leibniz would surely be astounded to learn that today’s introductory calculus textbook contains over 1,300 [...]...

Statisticians are woefully ignorant about computer science (CS). And computer scientists are woefully ignorant about statistics. O.k. I am exaggerating. Nonetheless, it is worth asking: what important concepts should every statistician know from computer science? I have asked several friends from CS for a list of the top three things from CS that statisticians should [...]...

Are we too “normal” in our approach to open problems? Boris Spassky is the oldest living world chess champion. He held the title 1969 to 1972, until famously losing to Bobby Fischer in the Match of the Century. Watching the game from the US was made even more exciting by the PBS broadcast hosted by [...]...