No, this isn’t about a movie starring Robert de Niro and Billy Crystal (although I do like that movie — especially the cameo appearance by Tony Bennett).
Sooner or later, just about every scientist has to deal with numerical data. That’s one of the good things about being a mathematician; everybody needs us. A lot of scientists (especially in the physical sciences) are talented mathematicians themselves and even make contributions to the study of statistics, devising ingenious new methods of analysis. A lot of scientists go astray, either because they don’t appreciate the subtleties of the analysis method they apply, or because they don’t know the right method to choose.
Because global warming is a prominent environmental and political issue, it has brought scientific data under the scrutiny of the general public. Those who viewed Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth probably never saw a movie with so many graphs in it! But one of the lessons of mathematics is that if we’re not careful, the numbers can lead us to the wrong conclusion. I think it was Mark Twain who said there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
