GOD, SKEPTICS, TAX AUDITS & HOW TO LIE WITH NUMBERS (INCLUDING ZERO)

Royal Museum, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

We're writing this on April 26, a very holy & magical day in certain remote monasteries and sacred temples.

It was November 26 when our brilliant friend Amir Aczel jumped the quantum. We're quite certain that - in sync with his sunny personality and big heart - on the other side of the membrane, in Jerry Seinfeld's words, "it's gonna be great!"

Amir Aczel, the Man who Discovered Zero!

Amir has been on our minds a lot this past month, as he was being honored posthumously at the Royal University of Phnom Penh for ... well, what else can you call it but "the discovery of zero"?

First zero ever recorded.

He first came on our radar in the 1990s, when he published his first non-textbook of 20 books, How to Beat the I.R.S. at Its Own Game: Strategies to Avoid and Fight an Audit. 

This eminently useful, even life-changing work bore just faint signs of his still-to-be-revealed super powers. But it sure scared the hell out of the Commissioner of the IRS, who complained to me: "He's cracked our code!"

Indeed, in addition to being a super guy Amir was a raving genius.  The IRS algorithm for its audits was child's play to the man who had literally written the book on statistics and moreover possessed a supercomputer.

Thus began a warm friendship and collaboration, starting with a series of his appearances on CNN, where I produced a repeating feature called "How to Lie with Statistics." He would regularly come on and shred the minds of the man-and-woman-in-the-street. Here was a sample scenario:

REPORTER

If your doctor told you that a medical test, guaranteed 99-percent accurate, revealed that you were suffering from a rare but fatal disease, how scared should you be? 

MAN OR WOMAN IN THE STREET

Terrified! 

DR. ACZEL, PROFESSOR OF MATHEMATICS

Wrong! You should be optimistic! Why? Do the math. In a population of 100-thousand, a rare disease would be, let's say, two cases. But a 99-percent accuracy rate means the test is wrong in one thousand cases! So your actual chance of having the disease is two in one-thousand - odds of 500-to-one AGAINST your having it!

Amir soon became one of America's premier science writers, with a string of popular writings on unlikely topics: Fermat's Last Theorem, The Story of the Compass, a film we co-wrote about Einstein and, above all, his groundbreaking discovery of ... Zero!

Of special interest to Houdiniphiles, Amir used his scientific and math skills to calculate the probability of God's existence: just about as close to a sure thing as you can get!