Math, FTW!

It is months after our last presidential election, and I can't stop thinking about Nate Silver's big win. "But Mrs. Meiergerd, Barack Obama won the election."  To you, students, I say this: Obama may have won the presidency, but there was no one more victorious on Election night 2012 than Nate Silver. And math.

So who is this guy? Nate Silver is what I would like to call a "Mathemagician." Using his skills in calculus and multiple sources of polling data, he predicted not only that Obama would win the presidential election by quite a margin, but also which candidate would win each state. Look at this map comparing Silver's probabilities of who would win each state to the final outcome. Notice anything? I'll save you some time, the maps are identical. Nate Silver PREDICTED THE WINNER IN ALL 50 STATES. 

How did he do it? Silver combed through polling data in every state, deciding which polls were the most accurate and valid. He then averaged these polls to come up with a leader and thus his guess as to who would win the state. He didn't stop there. He also added a measure of his confidence in the polls from which he made his prediction, taking into account things like demographics and polling trends. All this data certainly gave election officials something to look at. You can see his blog (called Five Thirty Eight) and all of his data here.

So who cares? Well, it is a safe bet that officials on both sides of the political divide will be taking note of Nate Silver and his predictions in the future. His book "The Signal and the Noise: The Art and Science of Prediction" is likely to become a best seller. It is said that no one can predict the future- well, BOOYA, math just did. 

Mrs. Meiergerd

P.S. If politics aren't your thing, how about sports? Click here to take a look at Nate Silver's NCAA bracket predictions!