Often thought of as the boring or unglamorous side of scientific research, statistics are in fact the quintessential interdisciplinary science and have powerful and far-reaching effects on everyone. Forecasting weather, preparing for emergencies, assessing the spread of disease, examining economic health and monitoring climate change are just some of the areas that rely on a sophisticated understanding of statistics.

Numbers are also the basis of much if the information which swamps us in the modern world. We live in the information age… and this information generates a LOT of complex data. As our methods for collecting, monitoring and storing data have dramatically improved in recent years we have entered into the era of Big Data, which offers both challenges and opportunities. How do we capture, curate, store, search, share, transfer, analyse and visualise data?

At this year’s Festival we’re probing the stats behind our lives and investigating how an understanding of statistics can be used to everyone’s advantage, as well as exploring the possibilities that arise from big data across diverse fields – in our Numbers That Matter strand.

We cover everything – from Sex by Numbers: the statistics of sexual behaviour (April 16) to Social Media: Spying? Sentiment? Source of Data? (April 9) and Scottish Independence: big data and big conversation (April 15).