Jay Cordes

Jay Cordes is a co-author of "The Phantom Pattern Problem" and "The 9 Pitfalls of Data Science", which won the 2020 PROSE award in the category Popular Science and Popular Mathematics. He earned a B.A. in Mathematics from Pomona College and a Master of Information and Data Science from UC Berkeley. His first profitable application of data science was the development of a simple online poker strategy that turned an initial investment of $50 into over $30,000. He was mentioned in Arthur T. Benjamin's book Proofs That Really Count: The Art of Combinatorial Proof for having solved a problem far beyond his mathematical abilities by building a custom computer program to tackle it. He also co-authored a chapter in the book The Mathematics of Various Entertaining Subjects, Vol. 3: The Magic of Mathematics. Jay is a science geek at heart who hopes to contribute towards "putting the science into data science" and improving the public's ability to distinguish truth from nonsense. He also enjoys writing biographies about himself in the third person.