Statistician to speak at Kenyon commencement
Kenyon College graduates will be schooled in statistics and predictions from one of the field’s most well-known gurus before they head out into the world this spring.
The college in Gambier announced Monday that Nate Silver, the statistician and journalist behind the popular website FiveThirtyEight, will give the commencement address at the school’s spring graduation ceremony.
TIME magazine named Silver one of the world’s 100 most influential people in 2009, part of the widespread recognition he received after he correctly predicted the electoral outcome of 49 states during the 2008 election, and all 50 states during the 2012 election.
In 2016, however, he incorrectly predicted Hillary Clinton would win the presidential nod into election night before switching to Donald Trump.
His FiveThirtyEight website, named after the number of electors in the Electoral College, was operated in connection with The New York Times before Silver and the brand moved to ESPN in 2014.
Silver’s use of critical thinking and analysis makes him the perfect fit to address students at the liberal arts school, said Kenyon College President Sean Decatur.
“Through his work extracting meaning from data on multiple fronts, from sports to science to politics, he exemplifies a core virtue of a liberal arts education: the ability to wrestle with tough and important questions through reason and analysis, as well as with passion,” Decatur said in a statement.
Kenyon’s 190th commencement ceremony is scheduled for May 19.