Chris Wiggins

Jul 20, 2023 | libraryjournal.com | Chris Wiggins |Matthew Jones

Wiggins, a professor of applied mathematics at Columbia University and chief data scientist at the New York Times, and Jones (Reckoning with Matter), a Guggenheim fellow and history professor at Columbia, take listeners through the history of data, beginning with the origin of statistics as a separate discipline and its widespread acceptance as the backbone of the scientific method.

Apr 25, 2023 | bigthink.com | Chris Wiggins |Matthew Jones

Excerpted from How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms. Copyright (c) 2023 by Chris Wiggins and Matthew L Jones. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” wrote the poet Allen Ginsberg.

Mar 27, 2023 | lithub.com | Chris Wiggins |Matthew Jones

When the gentleman-​scholar Francis Galton inspected his fellow men of Victorian Britain, he found them wanting: “We want abler commanders, statesmen, thinkers, inventors, and artists,” he wrote in an article called “Hereditary Talent and Character.” “The natural qualifications of our race are no greater than they used to be in semi-​barbarous times,” even though “the conditions amid which we are born are vastly more complex than of old.” Modern civilization was all too much.