The popular movie The Wizard of Oz was produced in 1939 and was based off the actual book series first written by Frank Baum in 1900. Frank Baum was known to have written the first 14 Wizard of the Oz books while Ruth Plumly Thompson wrote series 16-33. There is a mystery, however on which another author actually wrote the 15th book The Royal Book of Oz, which as Frank Baum as the author on the cover but there was a controversy saying Ruth Thompson actually wrote the book. Mays and a colleague Dr. Jose Binongo have used stylomerty to determine who is the actual author of the 15th book using two forms, blocked-nested factorial design, and nested design. Stylometry is the statistical analysis of variations in literary style between one writer or genre and another. This is used often to look at Shakespeare’s work and also can be used for paintings. First, they did a block-nested factorial design which pairs of books …show more content…
They used two blocks of word categories to discriminate between the two authors. Block 1 meant Baum’s words were used more often and Block 2 meant Thompson’s words were used more often. To start off they took 11 of Baum’s books and 11 of Thompson’s books to determine the correct author. The system had gotten 59 out of 60 matching the correct author. It was time to try the 15th book, which the results showed that Thompson is the author not Baum. Mays and Binongo proved that Ruth Thompson was the author of the 15th book, The Royal Book of Oz. Stylometry as shown that mathematics and statistics can be used to apply a wide range of applications. I thought that Darcy Mays did an incredible presentation because it really grabbed my attention with the topic. He explained each step and the situation good and it was easy for me to follow. I enjoy learning different scenarios where math and other subjects can be used