La Recherche on current mathematics
“Perrette asked why statistics did not have a category, and Mr Ruche said he had decided that, as statistics dealt with specifics, it was too empirical to be a section of maths.” Denis Guedj, The Parrot’s Theorem
In November, La Recherche (also) published a special issue on the power of mathematics. While this issue contains a load of interesting papers on the various facets of current mathematics, some of which being edited reprints of earlier papers, and includes a good interview of Wendelin Werner, I find it quite significant that none of those papers ever mentions statistics! It sounds as if statistics was not part of mathematics for the editors of this issue, especially when considering the section on the applications of mathematics that includes character recognition and computer intensive methods. I understand that Gödel’s theorem and the theory of proofs may be more appealing to the layman than machine learning or bootstrap, but I still resent this exclusion from the mathematical “pantheon”! (Ironically, or not!, one of the few statistics books included in the bibliography is Py’s “Statistiques sans formules mathematiques“!) This reminds me of the exclusion of statistics from the field of mathematics by the writer/journalist Denis Guedj in his otherwise captivating The Parrot’s Theorem!
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November 30, 2009 at 1:02 am
Xian, trolling ? :)
November 29, 2009 at 10:45 am
They’re right–statistics is not part of mathematics! I’d put statistics in the “engineering” category.
November 29, 2009 at 11:18 am
I do not claim statistics should or should not be part of mathematics. I agree it has an engineering component that subsumes mathematics and computer sciences. But, remember, this is France! Where there is not a single statistics university department, only subdivisions of math departments…
November 29, 2009 at 12:11 am
However the profession is getting cooler by the day.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/technology/06stats.html?_r=3&ref=technology
November 28, 2009 at 5:09 pm
Arrêtes, tu te fais du mal.
November 28, 2009 at 5:17 pm
mais non, mais non…!