During the 20th Century
statistical thinking and
methodology have become the scientific framework for literally dozens of fields
including education, agriculture, economics, biology, and medicine, and with
increasing influence recently on the hard sciences such as astronomy, geology,
and physics. In other words, we have grown from a small obscure field into a
big obscure field.
Bradley Efron
In a world in which the price of calculation
continues to decrease rapidly, but the price of theorem proving continues to
hold steady or increase, elementary economics indicates that we ought to spend
a larger and larger fraction of our time on calculation.
John Tukey
Many scientists a few years ago predicted that
an impending ice age due to atmospheric pollution presented a greater threat to
humanity than nuclear war. It was all the rage. Some of those same scientists
now predict a planetary holocaust by heat.
