this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2026
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Statisticians in reality are programmers, typically using R or Python to run models. You only ever touch math in undergrad.*
There's a long tradition of skipping hard math, though-- ever have a stats class that has you looking at a t-table for a critical value? That's because it gives us a cutoff to use instead of calculating a p-value (which is hard).
*Note: statistics majors in PhD programs still need the hardcore math. Matrix algebra, calculus, etc. Who else is gonna make the packages we use?
I took statistics with Roger Purves. I distinctly remember him saying that stats wasn't "math" in his intro lecture.
Hehe, I mean I'm forced to teach by-hand statistics to undergraduates and we have to do... arithmetics. Multiplication. Division. Square roots!
It's a pretty established truth that we don't really do math. Lol