Yeah, Silver and his math are jokes, because math has a liberal bias. After all, math is the reason Mitt Romney's tax plan doesn't add up. - William Rowan Hamilton

Trying to solve real-world problems, researchers often discover that the tools they need were developed years, decades or even centuries earlier by mathematicians with no prospect of, or care for, applicability.

Number is the ruler of forms and ideas, and the cause of gods and daemons.

It may not sound very consistent with any such professed humility on my part, if I say to you that, after having served for the Quaternions during fourteen years, and having (as America seems to think) won my Rachel—to be my own by an intellectual marriage—I now wish to wind up several scientific projects, from which those quaternions had for a long time diverted me; and feel as if I were entering, or had already entered, on a new harvest of labour and reputation. As to Fame, if it have not been won or earned already, it is not likely that any future exertion will make it mine.
But as to the Labour; that is a thing within everybody's power to judge of, even for himself. I have very long admired Ptolemy's description of his great astronomical Master, Hipparchus... "a labour-loving and truth-loving man."—Be such my epitaph!