Somehow, tickets are still available to see Nate Silver, the statistical guru of FiveThirtyEight.com and New York Times fame who correctly predicted how all 50 states would break in the 2012 Presidential Election, speak in Lincoln Park Friday.
Of course, Silver probably knew that there would be tickets available the night of. He knows lots.
Silver gained prominence during the 2008 election when he correctly predicted 49 of 50 states when Barack Obama took on John McCain. He was named one of The World's 100 Most Influential People by Time Magazine in 2009.
This year, Silver became the punching bag of the conservative right who claimed that his statistical models were flawed and that he was an Obama acolyte who was interested only in raising false hopes for his liberal friends and demoralizing surging Republicans.
This idea, of course, turned out to be hogwash when his models turned into an pitch perfect prediction of the 2012 landscape.
Following the election, he may be the most esteemed statistician in the country, and certainly the most celebrated on social media (see Drunk Nate Silver tweets for a seriously fun read.)
This won't be Silver's first time in Chicago. The analyst received a degree in economics from the University of Chicago in 2000 and wrote for a number of Chicago publications before traveling to London to attend the School of Economics.
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Before he got in the habit of accurately predicting presidential elections (and riling up frothing conservatives who didn't want to hear any of that) Silver made is mark as a baseball statistician along the lines of the "Moneyball" Sabre-metrics crew.
Silver developed a model called PECOTA that predicted player performance. Friday at the Karla Scherer Endowed Lecture Series for the University of Chicago, Silver will talk about both politics and baseball.
