Statistics, Data, and the Philosophy of Science: Challenges for the 21st Century

• Matt Reuter (Stony Brook University)

**Abstract**: Statistics has become a critical tool for understanding data in the physical sciences, medicine, social sciences, economics, and many other disciplines. However, its central quantities, such as the p-value, are often poorly understood and occasionally misapplied. In this talk I'll use the evolution of the philosophy of science over the centuries to present a history of statistics, its relation to data, and a context for these central quantities. Challenges for science in the 21st century will be uncovered and discussed as ongoing topics for global consideration. **Speaker Biography**: Matt Reuter joined SBU in 2015 as an Assistant Professor in the Institute for Advanced Computational Science and in the Department of Applied Mathematics & Statistics. He received B.Sc. degrees in chemistry and mathematics from Michigan Technological University (2006) and a Ph.D. degree in chemistry from Northwestern University (2011), where he was a U.S. DoE Computational Science Graduate Fellow. Prior to coming to Stony Brook he was a Wigner Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and a research associate at Northwestern University. Matt is the lead author of more than 20 peer-reviewed journal articles and was awarded the SBU College of Engineering and Applied Sciences Excellence in Teaching Award in 2017.