Author Biography

Nancy Pfenning received her PhD in Mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University in 1985. Her 1998 book "Chances Are..." is a bestseller at Prufrock Press, which specializes in gifted education. Since 1987 she has been teaching at the University of Pittsburgh, where she is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Statistics, liaison for College in High School Statistics, and a member of the American Statistical Association. Each year since 2005, she has used a draft of her new book to teach statistics to hundreds of undergraduates with her unique, "big picture" approach, which makes both the concepts and the learning process memorable to students. She is also a great believer in real-world applications, data collected from students themselves, and hands-on experiments---all ways that she has found to connect with her students, and to connect them to the wealth of ideas that statistics has to offer. In her free time, Nancy and her husband like to get together with their three grown children, with cooking, hiking, and traveling at the top of their list of favorite shared activities.