Readers' Choice Award Nomination: Nate Silver

Nate Silver is a man with many talents. The renowned author of The Signal and the Noise and editor of the FiveThirtyEight blog, formerly hosted by The New York Times, rose to international attention during the 2012 United States election cycle due to his levelheaded approach of crunching the numbers rather than being swept away by the emotional possibilities of any particular election, including the re-election of President Obama. He and his team correctly the election outcomes for the many races--confounding political veterans.

Earlier this year, Out named Silver its Person of the Year, and one media expert was quoted as saying, Silver was the "best stats geek who can also write--and perform on television."

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The news that he would leave the Times and take his blog to ESPN was met with incredulity, but Silver has always been a sports fan and he says that he will be able to apply his data-driven approach to everything--from TV shows to politics.

"I'm very conservative in some sense because I do believe that hard work is a huge part of the equation," he told the magazine last year. "It's often not sufficient to bring about success, but it's very often necessary if you want to be really good at something."