He "was a numbers fanatic," said his father, Brian Silver, a political science professor at Michigan State University.

"When we took him to preschool one time, we dropped him off, and he announced, 'Today, I'm a numbers machine,' and started counting," Brian Silver said. "When we picked him up two and a half hours later, he was 'Two thousand one hundred and twenty-two, two thousand one hundred and twenty-three."'

By kindergarten, he could multiply two-digit numbers in his head.

By 11, he was conducting multivariate analysis to figure out if the size of a baseball stadium affects attendance. By age 13, he was using statistics to manage a fantasy baseball team. When his parents refused to buy him computer games, he taught himself the Basic programming language and made his own.

Link

Like many, i religiously checked Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight site twice a day (once in the morning, once in the afternoon, and ok, i admit it, sometimes before bed, too), everyday for the last several months to get the latest on election poll numbers. My favorite part was watching the pie chart representing McCain's win percentage go up and down a tenth of a percentage. That and the scatterplots. Who doesn't love scatterplots? Thank god for computer graphing programs. It sucked having to actually figure out the line graph based on scatterplot data.

It was pretty clear based on his site that Nate Silver's a big nerd. After reading this International Herald Tribune article, i now see that Nate Silver is a big, nerdy genius.

Btw, he's started on 2010 Senate races over at his site. I'm staying far, far away.