There may be no one in the world today who is as gifted in statistics and literature as Nate Silver. The statistician and writer, who founded and is the editor of the FiveThirtyEight (538) website, is best known for developing the PECOTA forecasting system and correctly predicting the outcome of the 2012 US election.
Who is Nate Silver from 538?
Nate Silver was born Nathaniel Read Silver to Sally (née Thrun) and Brian David Silver on January 13, 1978 in East Lansing, Michigan. His mother, of English and German descent, was a community activist while his father was a former chair of the political science department at Michigan State University.
The story goes that Silver, from an early age, showed great mastery in math. He was also a huge baseball fan and growing up, which made it very easy for him to apply his numeracy skills to calculating baseball statistics such as batting averages. While attending East Lansing High School, Silver notably won first place in the 49th Annual John S. Knight Scholarship for Michigan State Senior High School Debaters. During this time, he also wrote and edited the opinion page for his high school newspaper, The Portrait.
After leaving high school in 1996, Nate Silver enrolled at the University of Chicago to study economics. During this time he wrote for the Chicago Weekly News and the Chicago Maroon before spending his third year at the London School of Economics. In 2000, Silver graduated with an Honors Bachelor of Arts and immediately landed a position as a transfer pricing consultant with KPMG in Chicago.
5 facts to know about the American statistician
- He developed PECOTA
PECOTA is a sabermetric system for predicting the performance and careers of Major League Baseball players. While working for KPMG, a job that Nate Silver has since described as his worst job, he developed the Empirical Baseball Analysis System with the primary purpose of helping fans interested in fantasy baseball as well as coaches and managers trying to predict player performance and valuation..
Silver then sold the system to BaseballProspectus (BP) for a partnership stake in the company. In April 2004, he decided to leave KPMG to take up the post of Executive Vice President of BP, as he developed his system to analyze a wide range of topics. He also became a writer on the company’s website, posting a weekly column called “Lies, Damned Lies.”
- He is a published author
In addition to his blog and his contributions to other mainstream publications like The New York Times, ESPN.com and Sports Illustrated, Nate Silver is a published author. In 2012, he published the book “The Signal and The Noise”, which made the New York Times Best Seller list and became the second best seller on Amazon.com.
- Election forecasts
The statistician who identifies as semi-professional and participated in a World Series of Poker tornament, correctly predicted the winner of the 2012 US presidential election in all 50 US states and the District of Columbia.
- He is openly gay
Nate Silver is openly gay and is widely considered a “gay icon”. It is unclear when exactly Silver began to identify as gay. However, the statistician and writer has written extensively about gay rights on his FiveThirtyEight website, where he presents statistics and arguments about the long to come.
- Prizes, recognitions and honorary degrees
Nate Silver has received numerous awards and recognition from reputable organizations and institutions inside and outside the United States. His first award came to him in 2008 from Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, which selected his blog FiveThirtyEight as the first-ever for the Notable Narrative award. In 2009, Time Magazine named him one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World”. In 2010, he was named one of the top 100 most LGBT people of the year by LGBT Out magazine, which also named him 2012 Person of the Year.
Regarding his honorary degrees, Silver received the first in 2013 from Ripon College which awarded him an honorary doctorate of science. A few days later, he received his second copy from The New School, which awarded him an honorary doctorate in literature. As of 2018, Silver has six honorary doctorates to her name.