Why are numbers beautiful? It’s like asking why is Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony beautiful. If you don’t see why, someone can’t tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren’t beautiful, nothing is.
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The polls have closed, the votes have been counted, and a clear winner has emerged from this election: statistics. Okay, Barack Obama also won, but everyone else is covering that story. So, let’s cover the real victory here, a victory for mathematics!
Mathematicians love Baseball. Maybe not the game itself (though many do), but mathematicians tend to love the metagame behind Baseball, the statistics of Baseball. As a result, there are a good number of mathematicians whose career is to analyse the statistics of Baseball. One such mathematician is Nate Silver; well, technically, his degree is in economics, but that’s close enough. Nate Silver is the co-author of the annual Baseball Prospectus, as well as many other books published by Baseball Prospectus. Baseball Prospectus and its eponymous annual volume is a group devoted to analysing the statistics of Baseball and forecasting the game of Baseball.
However, I’m not here to talk about Baseball; I’m here to talk about politics. In early 2008, Nate Silver started a site called FiveThirtyEight, a reference to the number of total electoral votes in a modern Presidential campaign. This site proclaims to do, in their own words, “Electoral Projections Done Right.”