andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-390 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: I studied math and physics at MIT. To be more precise, I started in math as default–ever since I was two years old, I’ve thought of myself as a mathematician, and I always did well in math class, so it seemed like a natural fit. But I was concerned. In high school I’d been in the U.S. Mathematical Olympiad training program, and there I’d met kids who were clearly much much better at math than I was. In retrospect, I don’t think I was as bad as I’d thought at the time: there were 24 kids in the program, and I was probably around #20, if that, but I think a lot of the other kids had more practice working on “math olympiad”-type problems. Maybe I was really something like the tenth-best in the group. Tenth-best or twentieth-best, whatever it was, I reached a crisis of confidence around my sophomore or junior year in college. At MIT, I started right off taking advanced math classes, and somewhere along the way I realized I wasn’t seeing the big picture. I was able to do the homework pr
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1 To be more precise, I started in math as default–ever since I was two years old, I’ve thought of myself as a mathematician, and I always did well in math class, so it seemed like a natural fit. [sent-2, score-0.731]
2 Mathematical Olympiad training program, and there I’d met kids who were clearly much much better at math than I was. [sent-6, score-0.404]
3 In retrospect, I don’t think I was as bad as I’d thought at the time: there were 24 kids in the program, and I was probably around #20, if that, but I think a lot of the other kids had more practice working on “math olympiad”-type problems. [sent-7, score-0.314]
4 At MIT, I started right off taking advanced math classes, and somewhere along the way I realized I wasn’t seeing the big picture. [sent-10, score-0.542]
5 ” Unfortunately I didn’t know about applied math at the time–at MIT, as elsewhere, I imagine, the best math students did the theory track. [sent-15, score-0.745]
6 I did well in my classes–it was MIT, I didn’t have a lot of friends and I didn’t go on dates, so that gave me lots of time to do my problem sets each week–and reached the stage of applying to physics grad schools. [sent-17, score-0.409]
7 In fact it was only at the very last second in April of my senior year that I decided to go for a Ph. [sent-18, score-0.279]
8 This wouldn’t normally happen, but we had a set-up in which the silicon wafer was heated in such a way that the center got hotter than the edges, and at the center there were no defects in the crystal pattern for the melting process to easily start. [sent-23, score-0.482]
9 ) We knew the positions and energies of our heat sources, and we had radiation thermometers to measure the exterior temperature from various positions, we knew the geometry of the silicon wafer (which was encased in silicon dioxide), and we could observe the width of the molten zone. [sent-27, score-0.917]
10 When I came to Bell Labs for my second summer, I told my boss that I’d decided to go to grad school in statistics. [sent-32, score-0.278]
11 I think he was right (about statistics being simpler than physics), but I really wasn’t a natural physicist, and I think statistics was the right field for me. [sent-34, score-0.32]
12 I’d taken one of them and liked it, and when I went to a math professor to ask what to take next, he suggested I go over to Harvard and see what they had to offer. [sent-39, score-0.38]
13 I remember spending many hours laboriously working out every homework problem using the Neyman-Pearson theory we’d been taught in my theoretical statistics course. [sent-42, score-0.421]
14 In late 2004 my students, postdocs, and I decided to set up a blog and a wiki to improve communication in our group and to reach out to others. [sent-53, score-0.42]
15 The idea was that we would pass documents around on the wiki and post our thoughts on each others’ ideas on the blog. [sent-54, score-0.442]
16 For one thing, after a couple months, the blog and wiki got hacked (apparently by some foreign student with no connection to statistics who had some time on his hands). [sent-58, score-0.398]
17 For awhile, I’d assign my students and postdocs to post while I was on vacation, but then I heard they were spending hours and hours on each entry so I decided to make it optional, which means that most of my cobloggers rarely post on the blog. [sent-61, score-0.728]
18 The weakness of my blogging is that it’s all in words, not in symbols, so quite possibly the time I spend blogging distracts me from thinking more deeply on mathematical and computational issues. [sent-66, score-0.416]
19 On the other hand, sometimes blogging has motivated me to do some data analyses which have motivated me to do new statistical research. [sent-67, score-0.295]
20 There’s a lot more that I could say about my blogging experiences, but really it all fits in a continuum with the writing of books and articles, meetings with colleagues, and all stages of teaching (from preparation of materials to meetings with students). [sent-68, score-0.421]
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