She could have been a horticulturist. She had, after all, thought it would be exciting to create new plants. But Kimiko Bowman, better known by her byline as K. O. Bowman, chose to be a statistician and help develop a formula for approximating the distribution of maximum likelihood estimators. It was by chance, really, that Bowman chose statistics. Some might even say statistics chose her. She began her college education majoring in home economics at Radford College. “I wanted to make sure I would graduate, and I thought home economics would be relatively easy,” said Bowman. “In my second year, the president of the college called me into his office and advised me to change my major to the science field. He thought my future would be much better in science. I [had] liked mathematics ever since I was a small child, so I immediately changed my major to math and chemistry.”
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