The Lady Tasting Tea

By David Salsburg,

Book cover of The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century

Book description

An insightful, revealing history of the magical mathematics that transformed our world. The Lady Tasting Tea is not a book of dry facts and figures, but the history of great individuals who dared to look at the world in a new way.

At a summer tea party in Cambridge, England,…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Lady Tasting Tea as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

As a professor at MIT, I used this book to introduce undergraduates in my course in environmental science to the love of statistics. No doubt it is a fun read because students in disciplines like engineering, biology, physics, and mathematics actually read it! I decided to use it for my course because of its entertaining approach to introducing fundamental statistical concepts and methods as it develops the history of the discipline with amusing color commentary about the principal players who starred in it.

Without sound statistical analyses, experimental data are figments of scientists’ imagination. It is a must-read to enjoy…

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