Births on January 13

Nate Silver, American journalist and statistician, developed PECOTA

Nathaniel Read Silver (born January 13, 1978) is an American statistician, writer and poker player who analyzes baseball (see sabermetrics), basketball, and elections (see psephology). He is the founder and editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight and a Special Correspondent for ABC News.

Silver first gained public recognition for developing PECOTA, a system for forecasting the performance and career development of Major League Baseball players, which he sold to and then managed for Baseball Prospectus from 2003 to 2009.Silver was named one of The World's 100 Most Influential People by Time in 2009 after an election forecasting system he developed successfully predicted the outcomes in 49 of the 50 states in the 2008 U.S. Presidential election. In the 2012 United States presidential election, the forecasting system correctly predicted the winner of all 50 states and the District of Columbia. FiveThirtyEight, like many outlets, said Donald Trump had a lower probability of victory in the 2016 presidential election than Hillary Clinton. However, the 28% chance of victory they gave Trump going into election day was significantly higher than that of most other analysts, and FiveThirtyEight discussed a Trump win as a distinct possibility, while most media treated it as a remote, if not near-impossible, outcome. In 2020, FiveThirtyEight correctly predicted Joe Biden's victory in the election, forecasting 48 out of 50 states correctly. However, while FiveThirtyEight viewed the actual results as a plausible scenario, it significantly overestimated Biden's margins in battleground states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.In 2010, the FiveThirtyEight blog was licensed for publication by The New York Times. In 2012 and 2013, FiveThirtyEight won Webby Awards as the "Best Political Blog" from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.

In July 2013, Silver sold FiveThirtyEight to ESPN, and Silver became its Editor in Chief. The ESPN-owned FiveThirtyEight launched on March 17, 2014. The site focused on a broad range of subjects under the rubric of "data journalism".Silver's book, The Signal and the Noise, was published in September 2012. It subsequently reached The New York Times best seller list for nonfiction, and was named by Amazon.com as the No. 1 best nonfiction book of 2012. The Signal and the Noise won the 2013 Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science. The book has been translated into eleven languages: Chinese (separate editions in traditional and simplified characters), Czech, Finnish, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, and Spanish.