One of the most tragic ironies of the various undergraduate programmes that run across our land relates to data in the curriculum. As far as I can tell, there has been an almost abysmal neglect of the use, appreciation and importance of data in our everyday lives in undergraduate programmes. I have often expressed strong opinions on the harm that results in myriad of ways to not just students, but also society and the nation.
Let me begin by illustrating the importance of data in language and literature. Back in 1843, American author Edgar Allan Poe published a short story titled, The Gold-Bug. The tale won a competition and was hugely popular in its time. The crux of the story relied on what seems to be the first use of data in English literature. More importantly, it engendered a bit of a culture of creating and deciphering secret codes.
For whatever reason, Poe was aware that the letter ‘e’ occurs with the greatest frequency in the words of the English language. In the story, Poe makes the protagonist use this knowledge to crack a secret code that leads him to a hidden treasure. Many years later, Arthur Conan Doyle uses the exact same idea in the short story The Adventure of the Dancing Men featuring Sherlock Holmes.
These two stories illustrate the use of frequency analysis to crack secret codes. Deciphering codes is of extraordinary importance for governments and the corporate sector, and frequency analysis as well as felicity with languages plays an important role. Of course, there is much more to it such as the use of IT and even mathematics. This, however, also allows students to look at ideas of frequency analysis for words. Recognising patterns that are emanating from data is also important in our everyday life.
This is best illustrated by the case of a real-life crime story where a British doctor, who had murdered one of his patients, was eventually caught through a simple but ingenious way of presenting data. Just comparing in a common-sense manner, the data patterns connected to the matter showed an unusual pattern. This led to the culprit being nailed. During Covid, I made a simple study of data related to five aspects of the spread of the pandemic in the National Capital region. This allowed me to make an accurate prediction as to when the second wave will abate in the Delhi region days in advance.
We also encounter a creative use of data, basic IT tools and mathematics in the realm of predicting the future. Take Google Maps, for instance. It uses all the above tools to predict the time a journey will take and also foretell the traffic density that we may encounter. We can also predict when a lunar eclipse will occur. Unfortunately,
I do not know of any regular exposure for undergraduates in most universities to even such basic but highly useful aspects of simple data analysis.
Dinesh Singh
Former Vice-Chancellor, Delhi University; Adjunct Professor of Mathematics, University of Houston, US
Twitter: @DineshSinghEDU