Gauss could add up hundreds of numbers in his head by the age of 3 and Mozart was playing the pieces he'd heard in church at home by about the same age. But who ever heard of a literary prodigy? Why not? Because literature is about the world and the wisdom one gains with experience, not about abstract rules and symbols. The same is true of Statistics. Rather than highlight the formulas that underlie Statistics, we need to emphasize the learning that Statistics gives us about the world. The most common mistakes in Statistics have nothing to do with calculation but everything to do with interpretation and context. How can we help students to use statistical thinking effectively in the chaotic maze of the real world?

Dick De Veaux is Professor of Statistics at Williams College, but for the academic year 2006/7 he will be the Kenan Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University. The previous year he was an invited professor at the Université Réné Descartes in Paris (Medical School). He holds degrees in Civil Engineering (B.S.E. Princeton), Mathematics (A.B. Princeton), Dance Education (M.A. Stanford) and Statistics (Ph.D., Stanford). He was also an Assistant Professor at the Wharton School and Princeton. He has won numerous teaching awards including a "Lifetime Award for Dedication and Excellence in Teaching" from the Engineering Council at Princeton. He has won both the Wilcoxon and Shewell awards from the American Society for Quality and was elected a fellow of the ASA in 1998. Dick has been a consultant for over 20 years for such Fortune 500 companies as Hewlett-Packard, Alcoa, American Express, Bank One, GlaxoSmithKline, Dupont, Pillsbury, Rohm and Haas, Ernst and Young, and General Electric. He holds two U.S. patents and is the author of over 30 refereed journal articles. He is the co-author, with Paul Velleman and David Bock, of the textbooks "Intro Stats", "Stats: Modeling the World" and "Stats: Data and Models" all published by Addison-Wesley. His hobbies include cycling, swimming, singing (barbershop, doo wop and classical) -- and dancing (he was once a professional dancer and teaches Modern Dance during Winter Study at Williams). He is the father of two boys and two girls aged 17, 15, 13 and 11.