The following TED video, given by mathemagician and professor Arthur Benjamin (about whom I’ve previously blogged about here), embodies the best idea I’ve heard about math education in a LONG time. Perhaps ever. Just as I recently posted about how games like backgammon embody the 21st century in replacement of games like chess for the 20th, statistics is the central branch of mathematics for the 21st century rather than the calculus centric view of the 20th century. If you’re into math and math education, this will probably be the best 3 minutes you’ll spend today.

A few days ago on Slashdot there was an article about a statistical model that claims to be able to accurately predict the result of a war nearly 4 out of 5 times. Here’s a snippet from the University of Georgia’s press release on Dr. Patricia L. Sullivan’s study: “‘If you know some key variables – like the major objective, the nature of the target, whether there’s going to be another strong state that will intervene on the side of the target and whether you’ll have an ally – you can get a sense of your probability of victory,’ said Sullivan, whose study appears in the June issue of the Journal of Conflict Resolution.” Very interesting. Statistics is a beautiful, and very misunderstood, field. When I hear about claims like this my ears definitely perk up. In general, studies like this propose that particular variables (such as a poor military strategy) are predictive of other events (such as a military victory). There’s obviously a cause/effect chain reflected in this type of idea. And believe it or not, there is a LOT of study in the area of cause/effect relationships. People like Peter Spirtes at Carnegie Mellon University spend a lot of time studying these causal relationships.

So while that claim that a statistical model can predict the outcome of wars should be taken with a grain of salt, everyone should consider the fantastic amount of research (and quality science) that is going into these types of causal models.