As business reports and scientific research papers, newspapers and other periodicals, databases and electronic mail, textbooks and other books all increase rapidly, the number of interdependencies among them rises exponentially. New ways to link, classify, and order the traffic on the information highways of the future are necessary if we’re to thread our way through the mounds of raw data strewn along them. Some understanding of basic mathematical and statistical ideas is necessary if we’re to avoid the condition described by the computer scientist Jesse Shera’s paraphrase of Coleridge: “Data, data everywhere, but not a thought to think.”
