falsifiability

Don't be misguided by the beauty of mathematics, if the data tells you otherwise

I was trained as a mathematician and it was only last year, when I attended the Royal Statistical Society conference and met many statisticians that I understood how different the two groups are. In mathematics you often start with some axioms, things you assume to be true, and these axioms are then the basis from which new theory is derived. In statistics or more general in science you start with a theory, or better a hypothesis and try to disprove it.