Penny S. Reynolds, University of Florida College of Medicine
FEBRUARY BIRTHDAYS
Carl Liebermeister
February 1, 1833 – December 24, 1901
In 1877, Liebermeister—a physician—published a Bayesian forerunner of Fisher’s exact test, 50 years before Fisher. The test had practical application for comparison of treatment efficacy in small-sample trials.
Jane Loevinger
February 6, 1918 – January 4, 2008
A psychologist, Loevinger developed Loevinger’s H scalability coefficient (a measure of questionnaire item pair quality) and the Washington Universal Sentence Completion Test, a widely used measure of ego development.
Jane Loevinger
February 6, 1918 – January 4, 2008
A psychologist, Loevinger developed Loevinger’s H scalability coefficient (a measure of questionnaire item pair quality) and the Washington Universal Sentence Completion Test, a widely used measure of ego development.
Daniel Bernoulli
February 8, 1700 – March 17, 1782
Although best known for his principles for conservation of energy, he made major contributions to statistics, including one of the first attempts to analyze censored data in a study of smallpox morbidity and mortality data.
Kate Claghorn
February 12, 1864 – March 22, 1938
First woman elected ASA Fellow. In 1896, she was the first woman to publicly earn the PhD degree from Yale. Best known for prescient work on social statistics, immigration, and juvenile socio-legal issues.
Isabella Leitch
February 13, 1890 – July 21, 1980
A nutritional physiologist, Leitch made major contributions to the development and quality improvement of systematic reviews. She was among the first to publish guidelines holding reviews to the same high scientific standards as ‘primary’ laboratory research.
Thomas Malthus
February 13, 1766 – December 29, 1834
Best known for his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population arguing against the contemporary view that societal progress was achievable by unchecked population growth. Paradoxically, he disapproved of contraception.
Francis Galton
February 15, 1822 – January 17, 1911
Statistical innovations include experimental derivation of normal distribution, correlation and regression, variance and standard deviation, and regression to the mean. He was a eugenicist and coined the terms “eugenics” and “nature vs. nurture.”
Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher
February 17, 1890 – July 29, 1962
Fisher made lasting contributions to both theoretical and applied statistics, experimental design, randomization, and analysis of variance. First president of the International Biometric Society. His racist and eugenicist views sparked debate about wider issues of diversity, representation, and academic values.
George Udny Yule
February 18, 1871 – June 26, 1951
President of the Royal Statistical Society, 1924–1926. Best known for influential papers on time-series analysis, regression, measures of association, and genetics. He began to study Latin to read Thomas à Kempis in the original language, which led him to work on statistical methods for investigating disputed authorship.
Dorothy M. Gilford
February 19, 1919 – December 6, 2014
ASA Fellow, 1961; Fellow of Institute of Mathematical Statistics, Royal Statistical Society, and American Association for the Advancement of Science. Head of mathematical sciences division, Office of Naval Research, and National Center for Education Statistics. Awarded Federal Woman’s Award in 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson, the second statistician after AJ Wickens to receive it.
Evelyn Chrystalla (E.C.) Pielou
February 20, 1924 – July 16, 2016
ESA Eminent Ecologist Award, 1986; Distinguished Statistical Ecologist Award, 1990; Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science. An influential ecologist in the 20th century for foundational work in statistical ecology.
Tobias Mayer
February 17, 1723 – February 20, 1762
His 1750 work on lunar motion was a forerunner to the least-squares method, for which he developed a set of 27 linear equations (“equations of condition”) to solve for three unknown parameters.
Adolphe Quetelet
February 22, 1796 – February 17, 1874
First international member of the ASA. Early adopter of the then-new science of probability and statistics applied to social science.
Royal Meeker
February 23, 1873 – August 16, 1953
ASA Fellow, 1916. Commissioner of labor statistics, US Department of Labor, 1913. Chief, scientific division, international labor office of the League of Nations, 1920. Advocated for progressive reforms, including minimum wage, national health insurance, child labor restrictions, and workmen’s compensation.
Richard Price
February 23, 1723 – April 19, 1791
Known for popularizing essays by his friend Thomas Bayes that were the basis of what is now called Bayes Theorem. He was a founder of the actuarial profession, developing methodology for insurance and annuities in the 1760s.
K. C. Sreedharan Pillai
February 24, 1920 – June 5, 1985
ASA Fellow, 1969. Known for research in multivariate statistical analysis and Pillai’s trace test statistic for MANOVA and MANCOVA.
Francis Ysidro Edgeworth
February 8, 1845 – February 13, 1926
President, Royal Statistical Society, 1912–1914. First to introduce the concept of “significant” differences, 1885, and the expression “coefficient of correlation.”
Joe Doob
February 27, 1910 – June 7, 2004
Pioneer in the study of mathematical foundations of probability theory. Known for the theory of martingales and stochastic processes. National Medal of Science, 1979. President, Institute of Mathematical Statistics, 1950, and American Mathematical Society, 1963–1964. Elected to National Academy of Sciences, 1957.
Florian Cajori
February 28, 1859 – August 14, 1930
President, 1917, and cofounder of Mathematical Association of America. Introduced the study of the history of mathematics as an academic discipline.
Herman Hollerith
February 29, 1860 – November 17, 1929
Inventor of the punched card tabulating machine, pioneer of data processing automation and mechanized binary code. Known for the first automated US census, 1890.
Events in February
February 8
Happy e-day! This is the day to celebrate the base of the natural log e = 2.7182818. e first appeared in print in 1727–8 in a paper titled “Meditatio in Experimenta explosione tormentorum nuper instituta” by the 21-year-old Leonhard Euler. However, John Napier had already compiled a list of logarithms to base e, and Jacob Bernoulli developed it to solve problems of compound interest.
February 15, 1946
Official launch of the ENIAC general-purpose electronic digital computer by engineers John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert (a demonstration for journalists occurred the day before). Overlooked were six highly trained female mathematicians who did the programming: Fran Bilas; Jean Jennings Bartik; Ruth Lichterman; Kay McNulty; Betty Snyder; and Marlyn Wescoff. They were not invited to either the first celebration dinner or ENIAC’s 50th anniversary.
1179
One of the oldest quality assurance trials in the world, the Trial of the Pyx, has occurred yearly since 1179 each February in the hall of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, London. Several thousand coins are randomly selected in fixed proportion to the number of coins produced. The process checks that newly minted coins conform to required government specifications. Substandard coinage is punished by the fining, firing, or imprisonment of the Master of the Mint. The last to be judged was Isaac Newton in 1696, but he was able to show the new reference standard was at fault and coins were not below standard.
February 8, 1587
Mary Queen of Scots was executed at Fotheringay on the orders of her cousin Elizabeth I. Exactly 436 years later in 2023, the DECRYPT Project published 50 decrypted cypher letters from her 19 years of captivity online. The code consists of 200 distinct graphical symbols. Cracking it required modern, computerized, statistically based cryptanalysis; manual codebreaking; and intensive linguistic and contextual analysis.
1757
Giacomo Casanova successfully talked the advisers of King Louis XV into establishing a national lottery system in Paris. It ran until 1836 and made millions for the government (4% of its national income). However, Casanova’s understanding of basic laws of probability was not so good when it came to his personal gambling strategies. He bragged how his martingale system would guarantee a win. Each time he lost, the bet was redoubled until he won. Unfortunately, the system only works if resources and bets are nearly infinite, so he ended up in debtors’ prison several times.
February 9, 1877
Francis Galton reads his paper, “Typical Laws of Heredity,” to the Royal Institution of Great Britain. He describes the apparent occurrence of intergenerational stability of inherited traits as a statistical balance between component processes, tendency to a normal distribution, and reversion (later called regression to the mean).
1934
Alan Turing (1912–1954), still an undergraduate at King’s College Cambridge, derives a rigorous mathematical proof of the central limit theorem for independent random variables. He had heard a lecture by Eddington in November 1933 about the distribution of observation errors and was unhappy with the lack of rigor. He never published his paper because he found out too late it had already been solved by Lindeberg in 1922. Nevertheless, it got him elected a fellow of King’s in 1935 at age 22 and won him the Smith Prize.
View the references for this month’s Time Series.
Leave a Reply