Author: David Spiegelhalter

Spiegelhalter is a statistician who spent a career on how uncertainty ought to be communicated, and held the Cambridge professorship created for exactly that. He gave evidence in the Harold Shipman inquiry and in the Bristol heart surgery investigation, using statistics to establish how many deaths lay beyond chance. The Art of Statistics teaches the discipline through real cases instead of formulae. During the covid pandemic he was one of the few public figures willing to say plainly which numbers were unreliable and why. He was knighted in 2014.