Penny S. Reynolds, University of Florida College of Medicine
Happy 185th birthday to the American Statistical Association! In 1839, William Cogswell, Richard Fletcher, John Dix Fisher, Oliver WB Peabody, and Lemuel Shattuck organized the ASA to collect, preserve, and diffuse statistical information in the different departments of human knowledge. The first annual meeting was held in Boston on February 5, 1840. The first international member was Adolphe Quetelet. The first honorary female member was Florence Nightingale in 1875. The society began publishing its journal in 1888.
1656
Edmund Halley is born. Although best known for his comet, he also worked on ideas later pursued by de Moivre such as actuarial statistics and life tables. His life tables and suggestions for practical application were based on good demographic records for Breslau.
1733
The normal curve is invented. Abraham de Moivre (1667–1754) publishes a pamphlet with the title Approximatio ad Summam Terminorum Binomii (a + b)n in Seriem expansi [Approximation of the Sum of the Terms of the Binomial (a + b)n Expanded into a Series]. It was translated from Latin into English for his 1738 book The Doctrine of Chances.
1807
William Farr is born. President of the London Statistical Society (now the Royal Statistical Society). Best known as collaborator with Florence Nightingale and one of the founders of medical statistics.
1815
George Boole is born. He is best known for his system of Boolean logic. In 1937, Claude Shannon demonstrated how Boolean algebra could optimize electromechanical relay system design, fundamental to modern digital computing.
1851
Jacques Bertillon is born. Physician, statistician, demographer, son of statistician Louis-Adolphe and brother of Alphonse, creator of the Bertillon biometric method, and inventor of the mugshot.
1857
Katharine Coman is born. Professor at Wellesley College; noted historian, economist, sociologist, social activist. First US woman to teach statistics. (Before 1900, Wellesley was the only American women’s college to offer statistics courses.)
1869
Arthur L. Bowley is born. Royal Statistical Society president from 1938–1940. Appointed in 1919 to one of the first chairs of statistics in the UK.
1882
Louis I Dublin is born. ASA Fellow 1916, ASA president 1924. Best known for using data to inform public health, he conducted sophisticated early epidemiological studies on typhoid, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, and US maternal death rates.
1891
Karl Pearson begins the first of his 38 Gresham College lectures on statistics. The lectures were the basis of his statistical theories, resulting in his first two published statistical papers and the creation of his biometric school.
1896
Winifred A. Mackenzie is born. First winner of the Royal Statistical Society Frances Wood Memorial Prize. Studied economic statistics with Arthur Bowley. Best known for her work at Rothamsted, including the first systematic description of ANOVA co-authored with R. A. Fisher in May 1923.
1912
Wilson Allen Wallis is born. ASA Fellow 1948, 60th ASA president 1965. Dean, University of Chicago Graduate School of Business; president, University of Rochester. Economics adviser to four US presidents: Eisenhower; Nixon; Ford; and Reagan.
1914
George B. Dantzig is born. National Medal of Science winner in 1975, he is known as the father of linear programming. The premise of the movie Good Will Hunting is based on his story of arriving late to a lecture by Jerzy Neyman, seeing two problems on the blackboard, and thinking they were a homework assignment. Six weeks later, Neyman came banging on his door when he was still in bed to tell him he had solved two of the most famous unsolved problems in statistics.
1917
Leonard “Jimmy” Savage is born. US Guggenheim Fellow 1951; IMS president 1957. Founder and chair of the Chicago statistics department. Best known for introducing Bayesian hypothesis tests and estimation methods, leading to what Kruskal later called “difficulties” with anti-Bayesian colleagues.
1917
Elizabeth L. Scott is born. Institute of Mathematical Statistics Fellow. Best known for application of statistical methods to problems in astronomy, meteorology, and status of women in academia. In 1992, the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies established the Elizabeth Scott Award, which is presented every two years at the Joint Statistical Meetings.
1918
Beatrice S. Orleans is born. ASA Fellow 1979. US Naval Sea Systems Command chief statistician. Best known for her 1978 development of a Bayesian sequential testing methodology for assessing the reliability and cost effectiveness of naval defense systems (her name is buried in the back of the report) and application of designed experiments for evaluating maintenance effectiveness of technical manuals.
1921
R. A. Fisher ushers in modern mathematical statistics with a paper read to the Royal Society of London, “On the Mathematical Foundations of Theoretical Statistics.” He proposes a unifying theory of statistics with the focus on problems of estimation and distribution; clarifies the difference between parameter and statistic; introduces key criteria of consistency, efficiency, and sufficiency; and provides new terms and definitions, including those for estimation and likelihood.
1922
Claus A. Moser is born. ASA Fellow 1965. Professor of social statistics and director of the Central Statistical Office. He interned during WWII and became interested in social statistics when a mathematician in the camp set up a ‘statistics office.’ He liked to call himself a “non-mathematical statistician” and said he never got over the sheer terror he felt when Maurice Kendall ordered him to teach a course on ANOVA despite his protests that he knew nothing about it. Kendall said that was why he should do it.
1926
Shirley Kallek is born. ASA Fellow 1972; Chief Economic Census staff, US Census Bureau; 7th president of the Caucus for Women in Statistics; Washington Statistical Society president 1980.
1927
Hirotugu Akaike is born. ASA Fellow 1981. Best known for the Akaike information criterion.
1927
Albert Turner Bharucha-Reid is born. Dean, A&S Wayne State University; distinguished professor, Georgia IT. Best known for work on probability theory, Markov processes, and stochastic epidemic models. National Association of Mathematicians named a lecture series in his honor.
1932
Ramanathan Gnanadesikan is born. ASA Fellow 1968, president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, International Association for Statistical Computing. Best known for work on factor analysis, multivariate analysis, and data visualization methods (particularly the Q-Q and P-P plots).
1934
David L. Sackett is born. Appointed first chair of the Cochrane Collaboration. His 1996 article in BMJ explicitly defined evidence-based medicine. Founder, first department of clinical epidemiology in Canada at McMaster University and Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine.
1936
Alan Turing reads his paper, “On Computable Numbers,” in which he introduces what he called the “a-machine” (automatic machine), to the London Mathematical Society. His doctoral adviser Alonzo Church later called it the “Turing machine.”
1937
Joseph L. Fleiss is born. ASA Fellow 1973, ENAR president 1986. Best known for development of the intraclass correlation coefficient and inter-rater reliability.
1952
The Universal Automatic Computer, UNIVAC I, mainframe computer at the US Census Bureau correctly predicted the 1952 US presidential election results. Because it contradicted Gallup poll results, CBS news anchors, including Walter Cronkite, thought UNIVAC wasn’t working. The success of this event dramatically increased public awareness of computer technology. It was Navy mathematician Grace Murray Hopper who programmed UNIVAC.
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