A Panorama of Statistics

Acknowledgments

Our longest‐standing debt is to Martin Gardner (1914–2010), whose monthly ‘Mathematical Games’ columns appeared in Scientific American from 1956 to 1981. We were still in high school when we first discovered these short, lively and often quirky essays, which have drawn tens of thousands of people (us included) in to the pleasures and fascinations of mathematics.

Among the approximately 300 essays (which were collected into 15 books between 1959 and 1997), there are fewer than a dozen on probability, and just a handful in which a statistical concept is mentioned. Each of us had, in the past, wondered why no‐one had yet brought Gardner’s vibrant approach to statistics. When we discovered our common interest, it became an irresistible challenge to do it ourselves. Our thirty‐six columns of ‘Statistical Diversions’ – conceived very much in the spirit of Martin Gardner – appeared between 2003 and 2015 in each issue of Teaching Statistics, published by Wiley, both online (at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1467‐9639) and in hard copy.

This book represents a substantial revision, reorganisation and extension of the material in those columns. We celebrate the memory of Martin Gardner by citing four of his marvellous essays in our answers to QUESTIONS 10.5, 11.4 and 12.2 in this book.

We warmly thank the Editors of Teaching Statistics from 2003 to 2015 – Gerald Goodall, Roger Johnson, Paul Hewson and Helen MacGillivray – for their editorial encouragement ...