Briefs

DM Direct Newsletter, March 31, 2006, By Mark Klein

In 1988, an obscure mathematician-philosopher named John Alan Paulos published Innumeracy, a book that described the mathematical illiteracy so many of us share. Dr. Paulos didn't remain obscure for long. Innumeracy soon showed up on the New York Times best-seller list, where it stayed for five months. He appeared on the David Letterman show, Larry King Live, The McNeill-Lehrer NewsHour and several other interview programs. His book has been translated into 13 languages including Finnish, Chinese and Hebrew. Clearly Dr. Paulos touched a nerve, not just here, but around the world.

Most people don't find pure numbers an eloquent medium of communication. Nevertheless, business decisions are, more than ever before, based on data analysis and interpretation. More and more marketers are mathematically sophisticated, but even numerate practitioners will struggle to find useful patterns in a large data file. The technical challenges facing marketers fall into several different categories: data collection problems, data interpretation problems and mathematics and science problems. The most pressing and most tractable of these problems is data interpretation, the focus of this article.

Here is the rest of the story.