Harvard statistician examines Beatles mystery
Mark Glickman is Fixing a Hole in Beatles lore. A senior lecturer in statistics, Glickman worked with Ryan Song, a former statistics student at Harvard, and Jason Brown, a professor at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, to tackle an enduring Beatles mystery — who wrote “In My Life”? As most Beatles fans know, John Lennon and Paul McCartney disagreed over who authored the classic from the 1965 album “Rubber Soul,” but mathematics seems to have finally settled the dispute. The answer might make McCartney’s fans Cry Baby Cry. That’s Because the evidence strongly suggests that the song was written by Lennon. “We found that the musical content was much, much more consistent with John’s style,” Glickman said. “According to our model, it was quite likely to have been written by him. What that means is … if you compare ‘In My Life’ to Lennon songs from that period and McCartney songs from that period, it...