Nate Silver

Passions

Vocation

Notable

American statistician and writer who analyzes baseball (sabermetrics) and elections (psephology). He is currently the editor-in-chief of ESPN's FiveThirtyEight blog and a Special Correspondent for ABC News. Silver first gained public recognition for developing PECOTA, a system for forecasting the performance and career development of Major League Baseball players, which he sold to and then managed for Baseball Prospectus from 2003 to 2009. After Silver successfully called the outcomes in 49 of the 50 states in the 2008 U.S. Presidential election, he was named one of The World's 100 Most Influential People by Time in 2009. In 2010, the FiveThirtyEight blog was licensed for publication by The New York Times. In 2012 and 2013, FiveThirtyEight won Webby Awards as the "Best Political Blog" from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. In the 2012 United States presidential election between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, Silver correctly predicted the winner of all 50 states and the District of Columbia. In July 2013, FiveThirtyEight was sold to ESPN, and Silver became its Editor in Chief. The ESPN-owned FiveThirtyEight launched on 17 March 2014. The site focused on a broad range of subjects under the rubric of "data journalism". Silver's book, The Signal and the Noise, was published in September 2012. It subsequently reached The New York Times best seller list for nonfiction, and was named by Amazon.com as the No. 1 best nonfiction book of 2012. The Signal and the Noise won the 2013 Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science. The book has been published in nine foreign languages: Chinese (separate editions in traditional and simplified characters), Czech, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Romanian. Having earned a bachelor's degree from The University of Chicago in 2000, Silver has since been awarded four honorary doctoral degrees: from Ripon College (2013), The New School (2013), The University of Leuven (2013), and Amherst College (2014). Silver is openly gay. He plays poker semi-professionally. Link to Wikipedia biography