Football teams have been wearing numbers since Arsenal experimented with putting their players in numbered shirts in 1928 (it didn’t bring them much luck – they lost 3-2 to Sheffield Wednesday). But…

“Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.” - George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, 1903. It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure…

A Sino-Italian workshop on Applied Statistics was held today at the Department of Statistical Sciences of the University of Padova. The organizers were Alessandra Brazzale and Alessandra Salvan from…

When a system is well understood, a well-constructed mathematical model of that system can make realistic predictions based on the data sets fed into it. However, when a system is not well-understood…

Here is a problem with truly huge numbers, thought to be unsolvable.  Imagine that you have 128 tennis balls, and can arrange them in any way you like. How many arrangements are possible?…

Mariners have long spoken of 'walls of water' appearing from nowhere in the open seas, that is why freak waves are called freak waves. Oceanographers have disregarded such stories and instead…

Falling oxygen levels caused by global warming could be a greater threat to the survival of life on planet Earth than flooding, according to an estimate led by Sergei Petrovskii, Professor in Applied…

In 2012, the enthusiasm for poll averaging reached a fever pitch. Very few people were critical of it and instead talked about how science had taken over predictive politics. (1) I was critical of…

While most people associate the mathematical constant π (pi) with arcs and circles, mathematicians are accustomed to seeing it in a variety of fields. Two University of Rochester scientists have…

Major League Baseball can help understand why maps used to predict shaking in future earthquakes often do poorly.  Earthquake hazard maps use assumptions about where, when, and how big future…