On Stories (From Fiction to Science-Fiction)

"One mark of a second-rate mind is to be always telling stories." (Jean de La Bruyère, "Les Caractères" Aphorism 52, 1688)

"If the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true stories, who'd have troubled to invent parables?" (Thomas Hardy, "Under the Greenwood Tree", 1872)

"All stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you. Especially do all stories of monogamy end in death, and your man who is monogamous while he often lives most happily, dies in the most lonely fashion." (Ernest Hemingway, "Death in the Afternoon", 1932)

"As if there could be true stories: things happen in one way, and we retell them in the opposite way." (Jean-Paul Sartre, "Nausea", 1938)

"A story must be told or there'll be no story, yet it is the untold stories that are most moving." (John R R Tolkien, [Letter to his son Christopher] 1945)

"Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts." Brian Aldiss, Penguin Science Fiction, 1961)

"Almost all serious stories in the world are stories of failure with a death in it. But there is more lost paradise in them than defeat." (Orson Welles, "Chimes at Midnight", 1965)

"Unless physical action reflects psychic action, unless the deeds express the person, I get very bored with adventure stories; often it seems that the more action there is, the less happens." (Ursula K Le Guin, "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow", 1971)

"Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us." (Stephen King, "Salem's Lot", 1975)

"Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core of science fiction, its essence, the concept around which it revolves, has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all." (Isaac Asimov, "My Own View" [in "The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction"], 1978)

"No story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old." (Salman Rushdie, "Haroun and the Sea of Stories", 1990)

"Nothing comes from nothing, [...] no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old—it is the new combinations that make them new."  (Salman Rushdie, "Haroun and the Sea of Stories", 1990)

"People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way around." (Terry Pratchett, "Witches Abroad", 1991)

"To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative - the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time." (Umberto Eco, "Six Walks in the Fictional Woods", 1994)

"Don't worry about trying to develop a style. Style is what you can't help doing. If you write enough, you draw enough, you'll have a style, whether you want it or not. Don't worry about whether you're "commercial". Tell your own stories, draw your own pictures. Let other people follow you." (Neil Gaiman, "Gods & Tulips", 1999)

"There are no stories without meaning. And I am one of those men who can find it even when others fail to see it. Afterwards the story becomes the book of the living, like a blaring trumpet that raises from the tomb those who have been dust for centuries." (Umberto Eco, "Baudolino", 2000)

"Stories are artifacts, not really made things which we create and can take credit for, but pre-existing objects which we dig up." (Stephen King, "Everything's Eventual: 14 Dark Tales", 2002)

"No story sits by itself. Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river." (Mitch Albom,"The Five People You Meet in Heaven", 2003)

"Stories come to us as wraiths requiring precise embodiments." (Joyce Carol Oates, "The Faith of a Writer", 2003)

"I think telling stories is like pushing something. Pushing against uncreation itself, maybe." (Stephen King, "The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah", 2004)

"Other people's stories may become part of your own, the foundation of it, the ground it goes on." (Ursula K Le Guin, "Gifts", 2004)

"Stories are webs, interconnected strand to strand, and you follow each story to the center, because the center is the end. Each person is a strand of the story." (Neil Gaiman, "Anansi Boys", 2005)

"People wanted the world to be a story, because stories had to sound right and they had to make sense. People wanted the world to make sense." (Terry Pratchett, "Wintersmith", 2006)

"True stories are the ones that lie open at the border, allowing a crossing, a further frontier. The final frontier is just science fiction - don't believe it. Like the universe, there is no end." (Jeanette Winterson, "The Stone Gods", 2007)

"Arithmetic is the death of story." (Jincy Willett, "The Writing Class", 2008)

"Do you know why teachers use me? Because I speak in tongues. I write metaphors. Every one of my stories is a metaphor you can remember. The great religions are all metaphor. We appreciate things like Daniel and the lion's den, and the Tower of Babel. People remember these metaphors because they are so vivid you can't get free of them and that's what kids like in school." (Ray Bradbury, The Paris Review, [interview] 2010)

"Old stories have a habit of being told and retold and changed. Each subsequent storyteller puts his or her mark upon it. Whatever truth the story once had is buried in bias and embellishment. The reasons do not matter as much as the story itself." (Erin Morgenstern, "The Night Circus", 2011)

"Don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth." (Rumi)

"[...] out of monuments, names, words, proverbs, traditions, private records and evidences, fragments of stories, passages of books, and the like, we do save and recover somewhat from the deluge of time." (Francis Bacon) 

"Of course all children's literature is not fantastic, so all fantastic books need not be children's books. It is still possible, even in an age so ferociously anti-romantic as our own, to write fantastic stories for adults: though you will usually need to have made a name in some more fashionable kind of literature before anyone will publish them." (Clive S Lewis)

On Stories (-1949)

 "A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility. The story should never be made up of improbable incidents; there should be nothing of the sort in it." (Aristotle, "Poetics", cca. 335 BC)

"In most sciences, one generation tears down what another has built and what one has established another undoes. In mathematics alone, each generation adds a new story to the old structure" (Hermann Hankel, "Die Entwicklung der Mathematik in den letzten Jahrhunderten, 1884)

"The motive for the study of mathematics is insight into the nature of the universe. Stars and strata, heat and electricity, the laws and processes of becoming and being, incorporate mathematical truths. If language imitates the voice of the Creator, revealing His heart, mathematics discloses His intellect, repeating the story of how things came into being. And the value of mathematics, appealing as it does to our energy and to our honor, to our desire to know the truth and thereby to live as of right in the household of God, is that it establishes us in larger and larger certainties. As literature 62 develops emotion, understanding, and sympathy, so mathematics develops observation, imagination, and reason." (William E Chancellor, "A Theory of Motives, Ideals and Values in Education", 1907)

"The story of scientific discovery has its own epic unity - a unity of purpose and endeavour - the single torch passing from hand to hand through the centuries; and the great moments of science when, after long labour, the pioneers saw their accumulated facts falling into a significant order - sometimes in the form of a law that revolutionised the whole world of thought - have an intense human interest, and belong essentially to the creative imagination of poetry." (Alfred Noyes, "Watchers of the Sky", 1922)

"The discovery that all mathematics follows inevitably from a small collection of fundamental laws is one which immeasurably enhances the intellectual beauty of the whole; to those who have been oppressed by the fragmentary and incomplete nature of most existing chains of deduction this discovery comes with all the overwhelming force of a revelation; like a palace emerging from the autumn mist as the traveler ascends an Italian hill-side, the stately stories of the mathematical edifice appear in their due order and proportion, with a new perfection in every part." (Bertrand A W Russell, "Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays", 1925)

"This is the reason why mechanical explanations are better understood than stories, even though they are more difficult to reproduce. The exposition, even if it is faulty, excites analogous schemas already existing in the listener’s mind; so that what takes place is not genuine understanding, but a convergence of acquired schemas of thought. In the case of stories, this convergence is not possible, and the schemas brought into play are usually divergent." (Jean Piaget, "The Language and Thought of the Child", 1926)

On Stories (2020-2029)

"Numbers are ideal vehicles for promulgating bullshit. They feel objective, but are easily manipulated to tell whatever story one desires. Words are clearly constructs of human minds, but numbers? Numbers seem to come directly from Nature herself. We know words are subjective. We know they are used to bend and blur the truth. Words suggest intuition, feeling, and expressivity. But not numbers. Numbers suggest precision and imply a scientific approach. Numbers appear to have an existence separate from the humans reporting them." (Carl T Bergstrom & Jevin D West, "Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World", 2020)

"So what does it mean to tell an honest story? Numbers should be presented in ways that allow meaningful comparisons." (Carl T Bergstrom & Jevin D West, "Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World", 2020)

"To tell an honest story, it is not enough for numbers to be correct. They need to be placed in an appropriate context so that a reader or listener can properly interpret them." (Carl T Bergstrom & Jevin D West, "Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World", 2020)

"[...] scatterplots had advantages over earlier graphic forms: the ability to see clusters, patterns, trends, and relations in a cloud of points. Perhaps most importantly, it allowed the addition of visual annotations (point symbols, lines, curves, enclosing contours, etc.) to make those relationships more coherent and tell more nuanced stories." (Michael Friendly & Howard Wainer, "A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication", 2021)

"Scatterplots are valuable because, without having to inspect each individual point, we can see overall aggregate patterns in potentially thousands of data points. But does this density of information come at a price - just how easy are they to read? [...] The truth is such charts can shed light on complex stories in a way words alone - or simpler charts you might be more familiar with - cannot." (Alan Smith, "How Charts Work: Understand and explain data with confidence", 2022)

"Data becomes more useful once it’s transformed into a data visualization or used in a data story. Data storytelling is the ability to effectively communicate insights from a dataset using narratives and visualizations. It can be used to put data insights into context and inspire action from your audience. Color can be very helpful when you are trying to make information stand out within your data visualizations." (Kate Strachnyi, "ColorWise: A Data Storyteller’s Guide to the Intentional Use of Color", 2023)

"Data storytelling is a method of communicating information that is custom-fit for a specific audience and offers a compelling narrative to prove a point, highlight a trend, make a sale, or all of the above. [...] Data storytelling combines three critical components, storytelling, data science, and visualizations, to create not just a colorful chart or graph, but a work of art that carries forth a narrative complete with a beginning, middle, and end." (Kate Strachnyi, "ColorWise: A Data Storyteller’s Guide to the Intentional Use of Color", 2023)

"When the colors are dull and neutral, they can communicate a sense of uniformity and an aura of calmness. Grays do a great job of mapping out the context of your story so that the more sharp colors highlight what you’re trying to explain. The power of gray comes in handy for all of our supporting details such as the axis, gridlines, and nonessential data that is included for comparative purposes. By using gray as the primary color in a visualization, we automatically draw our viewers’ eyes to whatever isn’t gray. That way, if we are interested in telling a story about one data point, we can do so quite easily." (Kate Strachnyi, "ColorWise: A Data Storyteller’s Guide to the Intentional Use of Color", 2023)

On Storytelling

"Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it." (Hannah Arendt, "Men in Dark Times", 1968)

"Scientific practice may be considered a kind of storytelling practice [...]" (Donna Haraway, "Primate Visions", 1989)

"Storytelling is the art of unfolding knowledge in a way that makes each piece contribute to a larger truth." (Philip Gerard, "Writing a Book That Makes a Difference", 2000)

"The human mind is a wanton storyteller and even more, a profligate seeker after pattern. We see faces in clouds and tortillas, fortunes in tea leaves and planetary movements. It is quite difficult to prove a real pattern as distinct from a superficial illusion." (Richard Dawkins, "A Devil's Chaplain", 2003))

"We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for." (Malcolm Gladwell, "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking", 2005)

"There is an extraordinary power in storytelling that stirs the imagination and makes an indelible impression on the mind." (Brennan Manning, "The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out", 2008)

"Mostly we rely on stories to put our ideas into context and give them meaning. It should be no surprise, then, that the human capacity for storytelling plays an important role in the intrinsically human-centered approach to problem solving, design thinking." (Tim Brown, "Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation", 2009)

"The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon." (Brandon Sanderson, "The Way of Kings", 2010)

"All good design is storytelling. All good storytelling is design." (Steven Heller, "Writing and Research for Graphic Designers: A Designer's Manual to Strategic Communication and Presentation", 2012)

"Nonetheless, storytelling and narrative are essential to the design writing process. Without story - or plot, if you will - what have you got? Even a factual business report can tell a tale, albeit often in a neutral manner. Not all stories have to be dramatic or melodramatic. Storytelling is simply the expres sion of something you, as the writer, believe is of interest to you, as the reader. Indeed, you may well be representative of your average reader." (Steven Heller, "Writing and Research for Graphic Designers: A Designer's Manual to Strategic Communication and Presentation", 2012)

"The storytelling mind is allergic to uncertainty, randomness, and coincidence. It is addicted to meaning. If the storytelling mind cannot find meaningful patterns in the world, it will try to impose them. In short, the storytelling mind is a factory that churns out true stories when it can, but will manufacture lies when it can't." (Jonathan Gottschall, "The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human", 2012)

"We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories." (Jonathan Gottschall, "The Storytelling Animal", 2012)

"Good visualization is a winding process that requires statistics and design knowledge. Without the former, the visualization becomes an exercise only in illustration and aesthetics, and without the latter, one of only analyses. On their own, these are fine skills, but they make for incomplete data graphics. Having skills in both provides you with the luxury - which is growing into a necessity - to jump back and forth between data exploration and storytelling." (Nathan Yau, "Data Points: Visualization That Means Something", 2013)

"The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell." (Ben Okri, "A Way of Being Free", 2014)

"There is no such thing as a fact. There is only how you saw the fact, in a given moment. How you reported the fact. How your brain processed that fact. There is no extrication of the storyteller from the story." (Jodi Picoult, "Small Great Things", 2016)

"Data storytelling provides a bridge between the worlds of logic and emotion. A data story offers a safe passage for your insights to travel around emotional pitfalls and through analytical resistance that typically impede facts." (Brent Dykes, "Effective Data Storytelling: How to Drive Change with Data, Narrative and Visuals", 2019)

"Data becomes more useful once it’s transformed into a data visualization or used in a data story. Data storytelling is the ability to effectively communicate insights from a dataset using narratives and visualizations. It can be used to put data insights into context and inspire action from your audience. Color can be very helpful when you are trying to make information stand out within your data visualizations." (Kate Strachnyi, "ColorWise: A Data Storyteller’s Guide to the Intentional Use of Color", 2023)

"Data storytelling is a method of communicating information that is custom-fit for a specific audience and offers a compelling narrative to prove a point, highlight a trend, make a sale, or all of the above. [...] Data storytelling combines three critical components, storytelling, data science, and visualizations, to create not just a colorful chart or graph, but a work of art that carries forth a narrative complete with a beginning, middle, and end." (Kate Strachnyi, "ColorWise: A Data Storyteller’s Guide to the Intentional Use of Color", 2023

On Stories (-1974)

"An average does not tell the full story. It is hardly fully representative of a mass unless we know the manner in which the individual items scatter around it. A further description of the series is necessary if we are to gauge how representative the average is." (George Simpson & Fritz Kafka, "Basic Statistics", 1952)

"The construction of an economic model, or of any model or theory for that matter (or the writing of a novel, a short story, or a play) consists of snatching from the enormous and complex mass of facts called reality, a few simple, easily-managed key points which, when put together in some cunning way, become for certain purposes a substitute for reality itself." (Evsey Domar, "Essays in the Theory of Economic Growth", 1957)

"In imagination there exists the perfect mystery story. Such a story presents all the essential clews, and compels us to form our own theory of the case. If we follow the plot carefully we arrive at the complete solution for ourselves just before the author’s disclosure at the end of the book. The solution itself, contrary to those of inferior mysteries, does not disappoint us; moreover, it appears at the very moment we expect it." (Leopold Infeld, "The Evolution of Physics", 1961)

"Of course, you all know the old story that some people use statistics the way an inebriate uses a lamppost - for support rather than for illumination. It is not really that bad at all times. Statistics are indeed used for illumination, the difficulty is that everybody is trying to illuminate a different point." (Hyman L Lewis, [in Gerhard Bry's "Business Cycle Indicators for States and Regions"] 1961)

"The two most important characteristics of the language of statistics are first, that it describes things in quantitative terms, and second, that it gives this description an air of accuracy and precision. The limitations, as well as the advantages, of the statistical approach arise from these two characteristics. For a description of the quantitative aspect of events never gives us the whole story; and even the best statistics are never, and never can be, completely accurate and precise. To avoid misuse of the language we must, therefore, guard against exaggerating the importance of the elements in any situation that can be described quantitatively, and we must know sufficient about the error and inaccuracy of the figures to be able to use them with discretion." (Ely Devons, "Essays in Economics", 1961)

"Taken as a story of human achievement, and human blindness, the discoveries in the sciences are among the great epics." (J Robert Oppenheimer, "Reflections on the resonances of physics history" , 1972)

"Our inability to measure important factors does not mean either that we should sweep those factors under the rug or that we should give them all the weight in a decision. Some important factors in some problems can be assessed quantitatively. And even though thoughtful and imaginative efforts have sometimes turned the 'unmeasurable' into a useful number, some important factors are simply not measurable. As always, every bit of the investigator's ingenuity and good judgment must be brought into play. And, whatever un- knowns may remain, the analysis of quantitative data nonetheless can help us learn something about the world - even if it is not the whole story." (Edward R Tufte, "Data Analysis for Politics and Policy", 1974)

On Stories (1975-1999)

"Exploratory data analysis can never be the whole story, but nothing else can serve as the foundation stone - as the first step." (John W. Tukey, "Exploratory Data Analysis", 1977)

"There are certain basic, known principles about how people's minds go about the business of understanding, and communicating understanding by means of language, which have been known and used for many centuries. No matter how these principles are addressed, they always end up with hierarchic decomposition as being the heart of good storytelling." (Douglas T Ross, "Structured analysis (SA): A language for communicating ideas", IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering Vol. 3 No. 1, 1977)

"A model […] is a story with a specified structure: to explain this catch phrase is to explain what a model is. The structure is given by the logical and mathematical form of a set of postulates, the assumptions of the model. The structure forms an uninterpreted system, in much the way the postulates of a pure geometry are now commonly regarded as doing. The theorems that follow from the postulates tell us things about the structure that may not be apparent from an examination of the postulates alone." (Allan Gibbard & Hal R. Varian, "Economic Models", The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 75, No. 11, 1978)

"However, for most of us, science functions like myth in that we have no personal experience in the matter. We put our trust in the scientific view given us by our culture and enshrined in its myths. If asked why leaves are green, most of us would probably mutter something about “chlorophyll.” But unless we were specialists, we would simply be repeating the story of someone else’s experience." (Wallace B Clift, "Jung and Christianity", 1982)

"Scientific theories (I have said) begin as imaginative constructions. The begin, if you like, as stories, and the purpose of the critical or rectifying episode in scientific reasoning is precisely to find out whether or not these stories are stories about real life. Literal or empiric truthfulness is not therefore the starting-point of scientific enquiry, but rather the direction in which scientific reasoning moves. If this is a fair statement, it follows that scientific and poetic or imaginative accounts of the world are not distinguishable in their origins. They start in parallel, but diverge from one another at some later stge. We all tell stories, but the stories differ in the purposes we expect them to fulfil and in the kinds of evaluations to which they are exposed." (Sir Peter B Medawar, "Pluto’s Republic: Incorporating the Art of the Soluble and Induction Intuition in Scientific Thought", 1982)

"The purpose of scientific enquiry is not to compile an inventory of factual information, nor to build up a totalitarian world picture of Natural Laws in which every event that is not compulsory is forbidden. We should think of it rather as a logically articulated structure of justifiable beliefs about nature. It begins as a story about a Possible World - a story which we invent and criticize and modify as we go along, so that it winds by being, as nearly as we can make it, a story about real life." (Sir Peter B Medawar, "Pluto’s Republic: Incorporating the Art of the Soluble and Induction Intuition in Scientific Thought", 1982)

"Myth is the system of basic metaphors, images, and stories that in-forms the perceptions, memories, and aspirations of a people; provides the rationale for its institutions, rituals and power structure; and gives a map of the purpose and stages of life." (Sam Keen, "The Passionate Life", 1983)

"Mental models are the images, assumptions, and stories which we carry in our minds of ourselves, other people, institutions, and every aspect of the world. Like a pane of glass framing and subtly distorting our vision, mental models determine what we see. Human beings cannot navigate through the complex environments of our world without cognitive ‘mental maps’; and all of these mental maps, by definition, are flawed in some way." (Peter M Senge, "The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization", 1994)

"The story of π has been extensively told, no doubt because its history goes back to ancient times, but also because much of it can be grasped without a knowledge of advanced mathematics." (Eli Maor, "e: The Story of a Number", 1994)

"Mystery is found as much in mathematics as in detective stories. Indeed, the mathematician could well be described as a detective, brilliantly exploiting a few initial clues to solve the problem and reveal its innermost secrets. An especially mathematical mystery is that you can often search for some mathematical object, and actually know a lot about it, if it exists, only to discover that in fact it does not exist at all - you knew a lot about something which cannot be." (David Wells, "You Are a Mathematician: A wise and witty introduction to the joy of numbers", 1995)

"The story of calculus brings out two of the main things that mathematics is for: providing tools that let scientists calculate what nature is doing, and providing new questions for mathematicians to sort out to their own satisfaction. These are the external and internal aspects of mathematics, often referred to as applied and pure mathematics." (Ian Stewart, "Nature's Numbers: The unreal reality of mathematics", 1995)

"There is much beauty in nature's clues, and we can all recognize it without any mathematical training. There is beauty, too, in the mathematical stories that start from the clues and deduce the underlying rules and regularities, but it is a different kind of beauty, applying to ideas rather than things." (Ian Stewart, "Nature's Numbers: The unreal reality of mathematics", 1995)

"The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question." (Stephen Jay Gould, "Life's Grandeur: The Spread of Excellence From Plato to Darwin", 1996)

"When scientists need to explain difficult points of theory, illustration by hypothetical example - rather than by total abstraction - works well (perhaps indispensably) as a rhetorical device. Such cases do not function as speculations in the pejorative sense - as silly stories that provide insight into complex mechanisms - but rather as idealized illustrations to exemplify a difficult point of theory." (Stephen Jay Gould, "Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms", 1998)

On Stories (2000-2009)

"Science is that story our society tells itself about the cosmos. Science supposedly provides an objective account of the material world based upon measurement and quantification so that structure, process, movement, and transformation can be described mathematically in terms of fundamental laws." (F David Peat, "From Certainty to Uncertainty", 2002)

"[…] a mathematician is more anonymous than an artist. While we may greatly admire a mathematician who discovers a beautiful proof, the human story behind the discovery eventually fades away and it is, in the end, the mathematics itself that delights us." (Timothy Gowers, "Mathematics", 2002)

"The danger arises when a culture takes its own story as the absolute truth, and seeks to impose this truth on others as the yardstick of all knowledge and belief." (F David Peat, "From Certainty to Uncertainty", 2002)

"The revelation that the graph appears to climb so smoothly, even though the primes themselves are so unpredictable, is one of the most miraculous in mathematics and represents one of the high points in the story of the primes. On the back page of his book of logarithms, Gauss recorded the discovery of his formula for the number of primes up to N in terms of the logarithm function. Yet despite the importance of the discovery, Gauss told no one what he had found. The most the world heard of his revelation were the cryptic words, 'You have no idea how much poetry there is in a table of logarithms.'" (Marcus du Sautoy, "The Music of the Primes", 2003)

"A narrative is similar to a model in three ways. First, narratives, like models, are conceptual constructions under the control of a story teller. Second, a narrative replicates some aspects of past experiences, recalling events that are at least temporally remote, and in most cases far away. Here's the present teller, close to the reader or listener, and there at a distance is the tale. Third, a narrative has a projective dimension. Reflection on past activity leads to planning and projection of future activity, so that the story teller anticipates encounters yet to occur. The projective aspect of narratives, and models, is essential for revealing unobserved, but observable, events." (Daniel Rothbart [Ed.], "Modeling: Gateway to the Unknown", 2004)

"The story of π reflects the most seminal, the most serious and sometimes the silliest aspects of mathematics. A surprising amount of the most important mathematicians and a significant number of the most important mathematicians have contributed to its unfolding - directly or otherwise." (J Lennart Berggren et al, "π", 2004)

"A meme is to thinking what a gene is to evolution. A meme is defined as any idea, behavior, or skill. Like a gene, it can replicate by transferring from one person to another by imitation: stories, fashions, inventions, recipes, songs, ways of plowing a field or throwing a baseball or making a sculpture. Like a gene, it competes with other memes, as ideas and behavior compete in a culture and between cultures." (Didier Sornette, "Why Stock Markets Crash: Critical Events in Complex Financial Systems", 2003)

"In science, all important ideas need names and stories to fix them in the memory." (Benoît B Mandelbrot, "The (Mis)Behavior of Markets", 2004)

"Limit a sentence to no more than three numerical values. If you've got more important quantities to report, break those up into other sentences. More importantly, however, make sure that each number is an important piece of information. Which are the important numbers that truly advance the story?" (Charles Livingston & Paul Voakes, "Working with Numbers and Statistics: A handbook for journalists", 2005)

"Numbers are often useful in stories because they record a recent change in some amount, or because they are being compared with other numbers. Percentages, ratios and proportions are often better than raw numbers in establishing a context." (Charles Livingston & Paul Voakes, "Working with Numbers and Statistics: A handbook for journalists", 2005)

"An infographic’s headline should summarize the main point of the presentation. Any introductory text or 'chatter' should explain the most newsworthy information within the context of the visual story being told; i.e., is the what of the story most important? Is the how of the story most important?, etc." (Jennifer George-Palilonis," A Practical Guide to Graphics Reporting: Information Graphics for Print, Web & Broadcast", 2006)

"Mathematical problems, or puzzles, are important to real mathematics (like solving real-life problems), just as fables, stories, and anecdotes are important to the young in understanding real life. Mathematical problems are ‘sanitized’ mathematics, where an elegant solution has already been found (by someone else, of course), the question is stripped of all superfluousness and posed in an interesting and (hopefully) thought-provoking way. If mathematics is likened to prospecting for gold, solving a good mathematical problem is akin to a ‘hide-and-seek’ course in gold-prospecting: you are given a nugget to find, and you know what it looks like, that it is out there somewhere, that it is not too hard to reach, that it is unearthing within your capabilities, and you have conveniently been given the right equipment (i.e. data) to get it. It may be hidden in a cunning place, but it will require ingenuity rather than digging to reach it." (Terence Tao, "Solving Mathematical Problems: A Personal Perspective", 2006)

"The appeal of Monstrous Moonshine lies in its mysteriousness: it unexpectedly associates various special modular functions with the Monster, even though modular functions and elements of Mare conceptually incommensurable. Now, ‘understanding’ something means to embed it naturally into a broader context. Why is the sky blue? Because of the way light scatters in gases. Why does light scatter in gases the way it does? Because of Maxwell’s equations. In order to understand Monstrous Moonshine, to resolve the mystery, we should search for similar phenomena, and fit them all into the same story." (Terry Gannon, "Moonshine Beyond the Monster: The Bridge Connecting Algebra, Modular Forms and Physics", 2006)

"Mathematical problems, or puzzles, are important to real mathematics (like solving real-life problems), just as fables, stories, and anecdotes are important to the young in understanding real life. Mathematical problems are ‘sanitized’ mathematics, where an elegant solution has already been found (by someone else, of course), the question is stripped of all superfluousness and posed in an interesting and (hopefully) thought-provoking way. If mathematics is likened to prospecting for gold, solving a good mathematical problem is akin to a ‘hide-and-seek’ course in gold-prospecting: you are given a nugget to find, and you know what it looks like, that it is out there somewhere, that it is not too hard to reach, that it is unearthing within your capabilities, and you have conveniently been given the right equipment (i.e. data) to get it. It may be hidden in a cunning place, but it will require ingenuity rather than digging to reach it." (Terence Tao, "Solving Mathematical Problems: A Personal Perspective", 2006)

"We all construct mental models that describe our various mental states, bodies of knowledge about our abilities, depictions of our acquaintances, and collections of stories about our pasts. Then, whenever we use our models of ourselves, we tend to use terms like conscious - when those reflections lead to choices we make, and we use unconscious or unintentional to describe those activities that we regard as beyond our control." (Marvin Minsky, "The Emotion Machine: Commonsense thinking, artificial intelligence, and the future of the human mind", 2006)

"Oftentimes a statistical graphic provides the evidence for a plausible story, and the evidence, though perhaps only circumstantial, can be quite convincing. […] But such graphical arguments are not always valid. Knowledge of the underlying phenomena and additional facts may be required." (Howard Wainer, "Graphic Discovery: A trout in the milk and other visuals" 2nd, 2008)

"Great stories agree with our worldview. The best stories don't teach people anything new. Instead the best stories agree with what the audience already believes and makes the members of the audience feel smart and secure when reminded how right they were in the thirst place." (Seth Godin, "All Marketers are Liars", 2009)

"Mostly we rely on stories to put our ideas into context and give them meaning. It should be no surprise, then, that the human capacity for storytelling plays an important role in the intrinsically human-centered approach to problem solving, design thinking." (Tim Brown, "Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation", 2009)

On Stories (2010-2019)

"An ending is an artificial device; we like endings, they are satisfying, convenient, and a point has been made. But time does does not end, and stories march in step with time. Equally, chaos theory does not assume an ending; the ripple effect goes on, and on." (Penelope Lively, "How It All Began", 2011)

"For too many traditional journalists, infographics are mere ornaments to make the page look lighter and more attractive for audiences who grow more impatient with long-form stories every day. Infographics are treated not as devices that expand the scope of our perception and cognition, but as decoration." (Alberto Cairo, "The Functional Art", 2011)

"It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern." (Daniel Kahneman, "Thinking, Fast and Slow", 2011)

"The confidence we experience as we make a judgment is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that it is right. Confidence is a feeling, one determined mostly by the coherence of the story and by the ease with which it comes to mind, even when the evidence for the story is sparse and unreliable. The bias toward coherence favors overconfidence. An individual who expresses high confidence probably has a good story, which may or may not be true." (Daniel Kahneman, "Don't Blink! The Hazards of Confidence", 2011)

"A proof is simply a story. The characters are the elements of the problem, and the plot is up to you. The goal, as in any literary fiction, is to write a story that is compelling as a narrative. In the case of mathematics, this means that the plot not only has to make logical sense but also be simple and elegant. No one likes a meandering, complicated quagmire of a proof. We want to follow along rationally to be sure, but we also want to be charmed and swept off our feet aesthetically. A proof should be lovely as well as logical."(Paul Lockhart, "Measurement", 2012)

"But the drifting apart of pure and applied mathematics is not the whole story. The two worlds are tied more closely than you might imagine. Each contributes many ideas to the other, often in unexpected ways." (David Mumford, ["The Best Writing of Mathematics: 2012"] 2012)

"Equations have hidden powers. They reveal the innermost secrets of nature. […] The power of equations lies in the philosophically difficult correspondence between mathematics, a collective creation of human minds, and an external physical reality. Equations model deep patterns in the outside world. By learning to value equations, and to read the stories they tell, we can uncover vital features of the world around us." (Ian Stewart, "In Pursuit of the Unknown", 2012)

"The first thing that you should understand about science is that it is almost always uncertain. The scientific process allows science to move ahead without waiting for an elusive 'proof positive'. […] How can science afford to act on less than certainty? Because science is a continuing story - always retesting ideas. One scientific finding leads scientists to conduct more research, which may support and expand on the original finding." (Victor Cohn & Lewis Cope, "News & Numbers: A writer’s guide to statistics" 3rd Ed, 2012)

"The process of visual analysis can potentially go on endlessly, with seemingly infinite combinations of variables to explore, especially with the rich opportunities bigger data sets give us. However, by deploying a disciplined and sensible balance between deductive and inductive enquiry you should be able to efficiently and effectively navigate towards the source of the most compelling stories." (Andy Kirk, "Data Visualization: A successful design process", 2012)

"The story of evolution unfolds with increasing levels of abstraction." (Ray Kurzweil, "How to Create a Mind", 2012) 

"Good infographic design is about storytelling by combining data visualization design and graphic design." (Randy Krum, "Good Infographics: Effective Communication with Data Visualization and Design", 2013)

"Many of the stories economists tell take the form of models - for whatever else they are, economic models are stories about how the world works." (Paul Krugman & Robin Wells, "Economics" 3rd Ed., 2013)

"Stories are how we think. They are how we make meaning of life. Call them schemas, scripts, mental maps, ideas, metaphors, or narratives. Stories are how we inspire and motivate human beings. Great stories help us to understand our place in the world, create our identity, discover our purpose, form our character and define and teach human values." (Jeroninio Almeida, "Karma Kurry for the Mind, Body, Heart & Soul", 2013)

"Graphs can help us interpret data and draw inferences. They can help us see tendencies, patterns, trends, and relationships. A picture can be worth not only a thousand words, but a thousand numbers. However, a graph is essentially descriptive - a picture meant to tell a story. As with any story, bumblers may mangle the punch line and the dishonest may lie." (Gary Smith, "Standard Deviations", 2014)

"We use maps to help us understand the world around us in the most effective and efficient way. Maps can summarize, clarify, explain, and emphasize aspects of our environment. Maps can play many roles. They support navigation and decision making, they of f er insight into spatial patterns and relationships among mapped phenomena, and […] they can tell stories. Maps do this well because they symbolize and abstract the reality they represent." (Menno-Jan Kraak, "Mapping Time: Illustrated by Minard’s map of Napoleon’s Russian Campaign of 1812", 2014)

"A worldview is a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic constitution of reality, and that provides the foundations on which we live and more and have our being." (James W Sire, "Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept", 2015)

"All cultures organize themselves around a story, which tells them how the world came into being - a creation myth." (William Byers, "Deep Thinking: What Mathematics Can Teach Us About the Mind", 2015)

"A good chart can tell a story about the data, helping you understand relationships among data so you can make better decisions. The wrong chart can make a royal mess out of even the best data set." (John H Johnson & Mike Gluck, "Everydata: The misinformation hidden in the little data you consume every day", 2016)

"The aim of physics is not merely to tell a convincing story about every object and every event in the material universe but to produce a single epic, a coherent theory for describing nature." (Hans C von Baeyer, "QBism: The future of quantum physics", 2016)

"A worldview is simply someone's relatively organized understanding of what the world is actually like. [...] Worldviews have four elements that help us understand how a person's story fits together: creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. ‘Creation’ tells us how things began, where everything came from (including us), the reason for our origins, and what ultimate reality is like. ‘Fall’ describes the problem (since we all know something has gone wrong with the world). ‘Redemption’ gives us the solution, the way to fix what went wrong. ‘Restoration’ describes what the world would look like once the repair begins to take place." (Greg Koukl, [interview with Jonathan Petersen], 2017)

"All human storytellers bring their subjectivity to their narratives. All have bias, and possibly error. Acknowledging and defusing that bias is a vital part of successfully using data stories. By debating a data story collaboratively and subjecting it to critical thinking, organizations can get much higher levels of engagement with data and analytics and impact their decision making much more than with reports and dashboards alone." (James Richardson, 2017)

"Euler’s general formula, e^iθ = cos θ + i sin θ, also played a role in bringing about the happy ending of the imaginaries’ ugly duckling story. [...] Euler showed that e raised to an imaginary-number power can be turned into the sines and cosines of trigonometry." (David Stipp, "A Most Elegant Equation: Euler's Formula and the Beauty of Mathematics", 2017)

"Most of us have difficulty figuring probabilities and statistics in our heads and detecting subtle patterns in complex tables of numbers. We prefer vivid pictures, images, and stories. When making decisions, we tend to overweight such images and stories, compared to statistical information. We also tend to misunderstand or misinterpret graphics." (Daniel J Levitin, "Weaponized Lies", 2017)

"[…] the story of π is the deeply ironic tale of one thinker after another trying to nail down the size of a number that is fundamentally immeasurable. (Because it’s irrational.)" (David Stipp, "A Most Elegant Equation: Euler's Formula and the Beauty of Mathematics", 2017)

"An all-inclusive model would be like the map in the famous story by Borges - perfect and inclusive because it was identical to the territory it was mapping." (Reuben Hersh,” Mathematics as an Empirical Phenomenon, Subject to Modeling”, 2017) 

"History of mathematics is done by mathematicians as well as historians. History models mathematics as a segment of the ongoing story of human culture. Mathematicians are likely to see the past through the eyes of the present, and ask, ‘Was it important? natural? deep? surprising? elegant?’ The historian sees mathematics as a thread in the ever-growing web of human life, intimately interwoven with finance and technology, with war and peace. Today's mathematics is the culmination of all that has happened before now, yet to future viewpoints it will seem like a brief, outmoded stage of the past." (Reuben Hersh, "Mathematics as an Empirical Phenomenon, Subject to Modeling", 2017)

"[…] the story of π is the deeply ironic tale of one thinker after another trying to nail down the size of a number that is fundamentally immeasurable. (Because it’s irrational.)" (David Stipp, "A Most Elegant Equation: Euler's Formula and the Beauty of Mathematics", 2017)

"Infographics combine art and science to produce something that is not unlike a dashboard. The main difference from a dashboard is the subjective data and the narrative or story, which enhances the data-driven visual and engages the audience quickly through highlighting the required context." (Travis Murphy, "Infographics Powered by SAS®: Data Visualization Techniques for Business Reporting", 2018)

"The second rule of communication is to know what you want to achieve. Hopefully the aim is to encourage open debate, and informed decision-making. But there seems no harm in repeating yet again that numbers do not speak for themselves; the context, language and graphic design all contribute to the way the communication is received. We have to acknowledge we are telling a story, and it is inevitable that people will make comparisons and judgements, no matter how much we only want to inform and not persuade. All we can do is try to pre-empt inappropriate gut reactions by design or warning." (David Spiegelhalter, "The Art of Statistics: Learning from Data", 2019)

"The story of life is really two narratives tightly interwoven. One concerns complex chemistry, a rich and elaborate network of reactions. The other is about information, not merely passively stored in genes but coursing through organisms and permeating biological matter to bestow a unique form of order. Life is thus an amalgam of two restlessly shifting patterns, chemical and informational. These patterns are not independent but are coupled together to form a system of cooperation and coordination that shuffles bits of information in a finely choreographed ballet." (Paul Davies, "The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life", 2019)

Michael J Moroney

"A statistical analysis, properly conducted, is a delicate dissection of uncertainties, a surgery of suppositions." (Michael J Moroney, "Facts from Figures", 1951)

"Historically, Statistics is no more than State Arithmetic, a system of computation by which differences between individuals are eliminated by the taking of an average. It has been used - indeed, still is used - to enable rulers to know just how far they may safely go in picking the pockets of their subjects." (Michael J Moroney, "Facts from Figures", 1951)

"If you are young, then I say: Learn something about statistics as soon as you can. Don’t dismiss it through ignorance or because it calls for thought. [...] If you are older and already crowned with the laurels of success, see to it that those under your wing who look to you for advice are encouraged to look into this subject. In this way you will show that your arteries are not yet hardened, and you will be able to reap the benefits without doing overmuch work yourself. Whoever you are, if your work calls for the interpretation of data, you may be able to do without statistics, but you won’t do as well." (Michael J Moroney, "Facts from Figures", 1951)

"Statistics is not the easiest subject to teach, and there are those to whom anything savoring of mathematics is regarded as for ever anathema." (Michael J Moroney, "Facts from Figures", 1951)

"The statistician’s job is to draw general conclusions from fragmentary data. Too often the data supplied to him for analysis are not only fragmentary but positively incoherent, so that he can do next to nothing with them. Even the most kindly statistician swears heartily under his breath whenever this happens." (Michael J Moroney, "Facts from Figures", 1951)

"There is more than a germ of truth in the suggestion that, in all society where statisticians thrive, liberty and individuality are likely to be emasculated." (Michael J Moroney, "Facts from Figures", 1951)

On Teaching (1990-1999)

"True Dialogue occurs when teachers ask questions to which they do not presume to already know the 'correct answer'." (Jay Lemke, "Talking Science: Language, Learning and Values", 1990)

"One of the lessons that the history of mathematics clearly teaches us is that the search for solutions to unsolved problems, whether solvable or unsolvable, invariably leads to important discoveries along the way. (Carl B Boyer & Uta C Merzbach, "A History of Mathematics", 1991)

"Probability does pervade the universe, and in this sense, the old chestnut about baseball imitating life really has validity. The statistics of streaks and slumps, properly understood, do teach an important lesson about epistemology, and life in general. The history of a species, or any natural phenomenon, that requires unbroken continuity in a world of trouble, works like a batting streak. All are games of a gambler playing with a limited stake against a house with infinite resources. The gambler must eventually go bust. His aim can only be to stick around as long as possible, to have some fun while he's at it, and, if he happens to be a moral agent as well, to worry about staying the course with honor!" (Stephen J Gould, 1991)

"[...] the first reason for teaching science to non scientists is that many of these nonscientists have a genuine desire to learn about science, and this, after all, is the best reason for teaching anything to anyone." (Jeremy Bernstein, "Cranks, Quarks, and the Cosmos: Writings on Science", 1993)

"We have to teach non-statisticians to recognize where statistical expertise is required. No one else will. We teach students how to solve simple statistical problems, but how often do we make any serious effort to teach them to recognize situations that call for statistical expertise that is beyond the technical content of the course." (Christopher J Wild, "Embracing the ‘Wider view’ of Statistics", The American Statistician 48, 1994)

"There are aspects of statistics other than it being intellectually difficult that are barriers to learning. For one thing, statistics does not benefit from a glamorous image that motivates students to persist through tedious and frustrating lessons[...]there are no TV dramas with a good-looking statistician playing the lead, and few mothers’ chests swell with pride as they introduce their son or daughter as 'the statistician'." (Chap T Le & James R Boen, "Health and Numbers: Basic Statistical Methods", 1995)

"Whoever teaches learns in the act of teaching, and whoever learns teaches in the act of learning." (Paulo Freire, "Pedagogy of Freedom", 1996)

"Because no one becomes statistically self-sufficient after one semester of study, I try to prepare students to become intelligent consumers of the assistance that they will inevitably seek. Service courses train future clients, not future statisticians." (Michael W Tosset, "Statistical Science", 1998)

"A teacher who cannot explain any abstract subject to a child does not himself thoroughly understand his subject; if he does not attempt to break down his knowledge to fit the child's mind, he does not understand teaching." (Fulton J Sheen, "Life Is Worth Living", 1999)