At 9:46 p.m., blogging on his site FiveThirtyEight.com, Nate Silver called the presidential election for Barack Obama. The television networks followed suit about an hour and 15 minutes later after most polls in Western states closed.
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He “was a numbers fanatic,” said his father, Brian Silver, a political science professor at Michigan State University.
“When we took him to preschool one time, we dropped him off, and he announced, ‘Today, I’m a numbers machine,’ and started counting,” Brian Silver said. “When we picked him up two and a half hours later, he was ‘Two thousand one hundred and twenty-two, two thousand one hundred and twenty-three...’ ”
By kindergarten, he could multiply two-digit numbers in his head. By 11, he was conducting multivariate analysis to figure out if the size of a baseball stadium affects attendance (it doesn’t). By age 13, he was using statistics to manage a fantasy baseball team. When his parents refused to buy him computer games, he taught himself the Basic programming language and created his own.
He graduated from the University of Chicago in 2000, and was working for (and bored by) the accounting firm KPMG when he began messing around with baseball statistics. He tried to predict players’ performance based on their similarity to players from the past, like Bill James, a pioneer in baseball statistics, had done. But unlike Mr. James, Mr. Silver adjusted for body type, including factors like height and weight, discovering, for example, that taller pitchers age better.
more . . .
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/business/media/10silver.html?em
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