In honor of April being both National Poetry Month and Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month, The University of Texas at El Paso Professor Larry Lesser wrote two haiku poems. The first parallels tightening a statistical model and tightening a poem, and the second uses a fortuitous numerical fact connecting a birthday probability to the fraction of values within three standard deviations of the normal distribution.

Adjusted R Square
At some point, adding
lines to a poem only
dilutes its impact.

99.73%
It’s why your birthday
is viewed as an outlier,
normally speaking.