Also interesting. Before posting I checked the electronic version of the
American Heritage Dictionary, copyright 1992, for "innumerate" and it did
not have it.
I have heard the term all my life, because my mother was a statistician. That is also why I spent hours immersed in actuarial tables, population distribution maps, and back issues of the Journal of the American Statistical Association when I was eight years old. I also got to go see the computers at the Census Bureau back when computers were computers, by golly, and the CPU alone took up the whole room.
My mother's favorite publication title was: "American Population Broken down by Age and Sex." Her favorite book on statistics (and mine) was D. Huff, "How to Lie with Statistics," first published in 1954, and now in its 39th printing. Over 500,000 copies have been sold. I wish it were 50 million. It should be required reading in high school. This might help reduce the shenanigans by politicians and business executives, such as president Bush's phony games with averages. See chapters 2 and 10.
- Jed
