Penny S. Reynolds, University of Florida College of Medicine
OCTOBER BIRTHDAYS
Oct. 1, 1912
Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw was born. She was the first female president of Manchester Statistical Society 1981–83 (member for 70 years, 1944–2014); Institute of Mathematics and Applications president 1978–1979. Although best known as a mathematician, she used statistics to influence government policy on social issues, actively promoting improved school standards and girls’ education.
Oct. 2, 1938
Donald E. Preece was born. He became a fellow of the Royal Statistical Society in 1963. A champion of experimental design (he famously constructed a double Youden rectangle from playing cards) and statistics education, he often complained about the emphasis on mathematically-oriented teaching at the expense of practicalities of study planning, design, data collection, and data cleaning.
Oct. 8, 1924
John A. Nelder was born. He became a fellow of the Royal Statistical Society in 1976, won the Guy Silver Medal in 1977, and Guy Gold Medal in 2005. He made major contributions to the design of experiments, especially block designs. He was the head of statistics at Rothamsted from 1968–84, and was a codeveloper with Peter McCullagh of generalized linear models, for which they received the inaugural Karl Pearson Prize.
Oct. 8, 1561
Edward Wright was baptized. He first proposed the use of the median (1599) as a measure of central tendency, a 1616 translation from Latin into English of John Napier’s pioneering work on logarithms, and even an essay on variance estimation for navigational application. He also is the first and only fellow of Caius College Cambridge to be granted sabbatical leave to be a pirate.
Oct. 9, 1924
Maurice Quenouille was born. He became a fellow of the Royal Statistical Society in 1945, Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 1952, and Indian Statistical Institute in 1964. Best known for the method of jackknife resampling 1956—John Tukey gave it the cool name in 1958. He also made major contributions to experimental design and time series analysis.
Oct. 10, 1919
William Kruskal was born. He became an ASA Fellow in 1958, was the 77th ASA President in 1982. He is best known for the 1952 Kruskal-Wallis one-way ANOVA rank test (with W.A. Wallis) and, in 1954, a landmark series of papers with Leo Goodman on measures of association for cross-classifications.
Oct. 12, 1917
Mavis Carroll was born. She became an ASA Fellow in 1971. She pioneered the industrial application of statistics at General Foods, being one of a tiny minority of statisticians revolutionizing design of experiments and application of quality and process improvement methods. She was also a card shark and code-breaker during WWII.
Oct. 14, 1900
W. Edwards Deming was born. He became an ASA Fellow in 1942. He revolutionized business and postwar industry through his pioneering methods for statistical process control and quality management. He also developed sampling methods first used during the 1940 US Census and collaborated with Lineweaver and Burk in the development of their eponymous double-reciprocal plot.
Oct. 16, 1893
Karl Pearson published his paper introducing the method of moments as a means of curve fitting to asymmetrical distributions as a general method for determining parameter values of a frequency distribution. In Oct. 1906, he also introduced the terms leptokurtic, platykurtic, and mesokurtic to describe shapes of frequency distributions. (He had proposed the blanket term “kurtosis” in June 1905).
Oct. 17, 1884
Charles Sanders Peirce and Joseph Jastrow publish the first randomized and blinded trial in experimental psychology. Random sequence allocation was performed by shuffling ordinary playing cards, blinding by conducting experiments in pairs with allocation concealed from one partner.
Oct. 18, 1919
George E.P. Box was born. He became an ASA Fellow in 1955, was the 73rd ASA president in 1978, won the Guy Silver Medal in 1964, and won the Guy Gold Medal in 1993. He was known for his quote, “All models are wrong but some are useful.” He made major contributions to experimental design, quality control, time series analysis, and Bayesian inference.
Oct. 20, 1881
George W. Snedecor was born. He became an ASA Fellow in 1939 and became the 43rd ASA president in 1948. He founded the department of statistics at Iowa State University, possibly the first in the US to use digital computers for statistical computations. He made major contributions to analysis of variance and covariance and developed the distribution of the ratio of two variances as a test of treatment differences, naming it the F-statistic in honor of R.A. Fisher. However, P.C. Mahalanobis had already tabulated it in 1932.
Oct. 24, 1899
Dorothy Swaine Thomas was born. She became an ASA Fellow in 1942. She was the 42nd president (and first woman president) of the American Sociological Association. She promoted statistically-based methodology for sociological data collection and interpretation.
Oct. 26, 1907
Margaret Jarman Hagood was born. She became an ASA Fellow in 1949 and was ASA director from 1953–55. She was president of the Population Association of America (1955) and Rural Sociological Society (1956, first female president). Her 1941 book, Statistics for Sociologists, was a landmark in the promotion of rigorous quantitative statistical methods for the social sciences.
Oct. 26, 1925
I. Richard Savage was born. He became an ASA Fellow in 1961 and was the 79th president in 1984. Editor of Journal of the American Statistical Association and Annals of Statistics. Brother of Leonard “Jimmie” Savage. World-renowned for applications of statistics to public policy, including AIDS spread, DNA fingerprinting, and human rights.
Oct. 27, 1678
Pierre Remond de Montmort was born. Best known for his book on probability, Essay d’analyse sur les jeux de hazard (1708, 1713). He gave solutions for probability problems presented by Christiaan Huygens in De Ratiociniis in Ludo Aleae. He also famously quarreled with Abraham de Moivre, who wrote rude remarks about him in De Mensura Sortis (1711).
Oct. 28, 1908
Margaret Gurney was born. She became an ASA fellow in 1968. Best known for her work at the US Census Bureau on sample surveys and nonsampling error. She was an early programmer of the UNIVAC computer. She was awarded the Department of Commerce Silver Medal for her work as an international statistical consultant and trainer.
Oct. 28, 1912
Sir Richard Doll was born. He was best known for his work with Austin Bradford Hill demonstrating the relationship of smoking and lung cancer.
Oct. 28, 1804
Pierre François Verhulst was born. He was best known for the development of the logistic function as a model for population growth 1838–1847, later rediscovered by Pearl and Reed (1920) and Yule (1925), who revived the name “logistic.” Probably a bit biased by having developed the concept of the Average Man, Adolph Quetelet thought Verhulst’s early death was because he was too tall, but it was more likely due to tuberculosis.
Oct. 30, 1933
Jerzy Neyman (ASA Fellow 1942) and Egon Pearson read a paper to Royal Society and first use the terms “Type I error” and “Type II error.” It took time to find the right phrasing; in 1928, they called them “first and second source of error,” then in February 1933, “errors of first and second kind.”
Oct. 30, 1912
Jerome Cornfield was born. He became an ASA Fellow in 1951 and was the 69th ASA president in 1974. He provided major contributions to likelihood, Bayesian inference, multiple logistic regression, and clinical trial design. Although (or because) he smoked cigars, he played a major role in establishing the causal link between smoking and lung cancer.
Oct. 31, 1902
Abraham Wald was born. He became an ASA Fellow in 1945. He was best known for his WWII work on aircraft survivability and survival bias, but he also made major contributions to sequential analysis, estimation, and hypothesis testing.
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