The reading list appears in the second edition of Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks (Oxford University Press, 2017) by Andrew Gelman and Deborah Nolan.
I didn't know of Deborah, but I do know that Andrew is a chess player, and a reader of (and occasional commentor on) our old blog, from which the cited piece is taken. You'll probably have seen it a few times before, but hopefully it'll now be read by large numbers of Statistics students.
Maybe even all 605 million of them.
Taking the story a bit further, it would appear the management of the international chess body, the President at least, actually believe that extrapolated count and try to make policy decisions accordingly.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.chessbase.com/post/ilyumzhinov-announces-30-million-kirsan-fund-for-chess
RdC
Thanks for the plug. We fully expect to sell another 600 million or so copies, now that our little teaching book is known to the international chess community.
ReplyDeleteUnrelatedly, I went to grad school with Christian Hesse, a math professor who wrote the book of chess stories discussed here. Chrissy takes a softer line than you or I or Edward Winter do on copying others' work without attribution. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that Chrissy is, like Ray Keene and Garry Kasparov, a much better player than I will ever be. You could wake up Chrissy at 3 in the morning, set him to play a game where he gets 5 minutes and I get an hour, give me knight odds--and he'd still thrash me.
600 million is in fact our daily readership.
ReplyDeleteCongrats! It is a fascinating story of how a guess can be puffed into 'common knowledge'.
ReplyDeletee.g. Anna Rudolf celebrating the 600 million. I've heard her say it before, this is the latest. 59:39
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ovl12b79tf4
Ha ha great spot I think I'll post on that
ReplyDelete