The lasting lure of logic
Ask Harvard statistician Joseph K. Blitztstein about chess, probability, logic puzzles, network theory, combinatorics, the novels of George R.R. Martin, and even cats. He’s your man, and you’ll learn something. Harvard seniors think so. This month they voted Blitzstein a “favorite professor” — the fourth senior class in a row to so anoint his kinetic and sweeping introductory course, Statistics 110. He has also won Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa teaching prize (2009), headlined the first David K. Pickard Memorial Lecture (2010), and won the 2010-2011 Levenson Prize for teaching. The California native is the latest senior professor in Harvard’s small but influential Department of Statistics. (Its graduate students, like Blitzstein, win teaching awards with metronome regularity.) He is also the department’s first professor of the practice, a senior, permanent position. Blitzstein will admit that statistics — a subject widely feared and widely required — is “difficult to teach well. Not many people are...