Be afraid, be very afraid

I'm not afraid of numbers, but I'm afraid Neil deGrasse Tyson got his numbers wrong in the final paragraph of "Fear of Numbers" (12/01-1/02). Unless the recent census undercounted the U.S. population by more than 25 billion (the equivalent of twenty Chinas), Tyson means that $250 million comes to less than one dollar per American, not less than one cent. Sorry, Neil: I can't give this essay a perfect 10. But, unintimidated by decimals, I'll readily give it a 9.9.

Dan Heaton
New Haven, Connecticut

What a boner in an article on numbers!

Theodore Cohn
New York, New York

I find it difficult to believe that there are over 25 billion people in the USA. Perhaps this explains why the A train is so crowded.

Richard Strassberg
New York, New York

My sympathies. Isn't it all too easy to overlook orders of magnitude? Recently in a statistics class I teach, I missed a standard deviation by a factor of ten. I confess, sometimes I do have a fear of numbers.

Victor W. Goodman
via e-mail

I'm still puzzling over the arithmetic in the last paragraph. Let me ask, how many letters have you received on this subject?

James E. Beckman
Leonardo, New Jersey

THE EDITORS REPLY:

A zillion.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON REPLIES: I had e-mail on this error before I opened my own copy of the magazine. Of all the essays in which to make a mistake of two orders of magnitude, how embarrassing that "Fear of Numbers" was the one. While I regret the error, I remain happily surprised by how many people were paying attention.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning