Nate Silver is 30 and has no experience as a political pundit or expert. Yet he predicted the historic outcome of the 2008 US elections back in March, 2008, long before the Democratic Party candidate – Barack Obama – had even been selected.
The New York Times today reports on Silver’s success. What was his secret? Maths.
Mr. Silver has believed in numbers the way authors believe in words, as capable of expression and provocation, since he was young.
He “was a numbers fanatic,” said his father, Brian Silver, a political science professor at Michigan State University.
“When we took him to preschool one time, we dropped him off, and he announced, ‘Today, I’m a numbers machine,’ and started counting,” Brian Silver said. “When we picked him up two and a half hours later, he was ‘Two thousand one hundred and twenty-two, two thousand one hundred and twenty-three…’ ”
This incredible facility with numbers led Silver to an interest in baseball statistics, and thence number-crunching politics. Silver recognised that some polls were more accurate than others, some were partisan, and so forth. By doing analyses of these polls’ historic accuracy he was able to make much better predictions.
This effort paid off as the site Silver set up to track the 2008 US election, www.fivethirtyeight.com (named for the total number of votes up for grabs in the ‘Electoral College’), got five million ‘hits’ on election day.
Silver’s site had rapidly become the go-to place for accurate election prediction and analysis, and he even started to make regular appearances on the TV networks whose sometimes shaky punditry he had decried on his website. Publishers are calling about a future book, but Silver it seems will continue to analyse political statistics long after the heady rush of a general election has faded.
Children, like the young Nate Silver, who can do multivariate analysis at 11 years, or 2-digit multiplications at five, are truly few and far between, but that’s no reason not to boost your child’s maths age. Try our newly-released free service, featuring some fun maths exercise samples, by clicking the ’students’ panel on our homepage.