Here they distill much of that material into a fascinating text, chronicling the way society has collected and used data over the last three centuries and describing what they see as the way forward. In 2017, they teamed up to teach what has become one of Columbia College’s most popular courses - the history of data science. Jones argue that the road to data dominance has been much longer than we might have thought. But how did we get here? Columbia mathematics professor Chris Wiggins and Columbia history professor Matthew L. Our world is powered by numbers: data-driven algorithms decide everything from what ads we see online to how we board a flight. While all are well-drawn, the star of the show is clearly Jean, a cantankerous sage, who “made art seem like something any obsessive loner who craved it could achieve.” How Data Happenedīy Chris Wiggins ’93CC and Matthew L. In her latest novel, Idra Novey - also a poet and translator - introduces us to a memorable cast of characters who skillfully illustrate the increasingly stark divide between rural and urban America. Leah travels back to the Allegheny Mountains to find not only the sculptures but also a young man who has been living with Jean, embracing her as family when Leah could not.

But then her ex-stepmother Jean dies, leaving Leah a strange collection of giant sculptures. With a busy New York City life, Leah thinks she’s finally escaped her Appalachian childhood. The Crafts garnered some celebrity, and their story has been told before, but Ilyon Woo breathes new life into it, relying on exhaustive research to recreate their harrowing journey in astonishing detail. But what made their journey especially remarkable was that they traveled: out in the open, on trains and on steamships, with the light-skinned Ellen dressed as a man and the darker William posing as “his” slave. As dawn broke on December 20, 1848, enslaved couple William and Ellen Craft escaped captivity in Macon, Georgia, and fled to freedom in the North.

The road past mandalay