Penny S. Reynolds, University of Florida College of Medicine
MAY BIRTHDAYS
1623 Sir William Petty (May 26) pioneered the use of quantitative estimation methods (mostly averages) at a time when economics consisted of subjective descriptions. His Political Arithmetick was the foundation for modern macroeconomics. He worked with John Graunt on bills of mortality, developed crude census methods, and published one of the first books of vital statistics.
1677 Abraham de Moivre (May 26) Pioneer of classical probability theory, he is best known for his large-sample approximation to the binomial by the normal distribution, first published in Latin in 1733 and later expanded in his book, The Doctrine of Chances.
1686 Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (May 24) pioneered exact thermometry using early principles of gauge repeatability and reproducibility. His mercury-in-glass thermometer (1714) with scale calibration and reproducible benchmarks was the most reliable and accurate temperature device for centuries, and the Fahrenheit scale was the primary temperature standard until the 1970s.
1754 Colonel Sir John Sinclair (May 10) was one of the founding members of the Statistical Society of London in 1834. He introduced the words “statistics” and “statistical” for the first time in English in his 1791 magnum opus, Statistical Account of Scotland. He apologized for using anglicized German words rather than devising a “real” English word.
1820 Florence Nightingale (May 12). Best known as the founder of modern nursing but also a renowned statistician and data visualization pioneer. First woman elected to membership in the Royal Statistical Society in 1859 and honorary member of the ASA in 1875. Her infographics and vigorous promotion of standardized data collection and statistical rigor led to massive health care policy and social reforms.
1821 Pafnuty Chebyshev (May 16) Founder of Russian mathematics. Among the first to think systematically in terms of random variables, moments, and expectations. Best known for Chebyshev inequality and important contributions to probability, statistics, mechanics, orthogonal polynomials, generalization of the beta function, and number theory.
1860 D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (May 2) A pioneer of mathematical biology, he was among the first to describe numerical relationships between spiral structures in plants and animals and Fibonacci sequences. His methods for quantifying shape deformation have been extended to such modern applications as computer vision and facial recognition.
1863 Miles Menander Dawson (May 13) One of the inaugural Fellows of the American Statistical Association in 1914. He worked on the mathematics of insurance and workers’ compensation. In his spare time, he was a poet and translator of the works of Confucius and Zoroaster.
1874 Beatrice Cave-Browne-Cave (May 30) Worked with Karl Pearson on child development and correlation of inherited traits. In 1916, she joined the Admiralty, where she used applied math to revolutionize fixed-wing aircraft design and safety.
1875 George O. May (May 22) ASA Fellow 1941. Senior partner at Price Waterhouse, awarded the AICPA Gold Medal in 1944 and elected to the Accounting Hall of Fame in 1950 for key developments leading to stronger corporate auditing and accounting.
1887 Louis Leon Thurstone (May 29) ASA Fellow 1949. Pioneer in psychometrics and psychophysics. Best known for statistical models of human intelligence and contributions to factor analysis.
1896 Halbert L. Dunn (May 17) ASA Fellow 1939. Chief National Office of Vital Statistics, US Bureau of the Census, 1935–1960. Best known as the father of the modern wellness movement, he also wrote the earliest review (1929) complaining of the generally poor statistical methodology in clinical and preclinical research.
1899 Joseph Berkson (May 14). ASA Fellow 1940. Best known for introduction of the logit model in 1944 and Berkson’s paradox (collider or ascertainment bias). Like Ronald Fisher, he opposed data showing smoking causes cancer.
1902 Frank Yates (May 12) Guy Gold Medal 1960. A giant of experimental design, he was the head of statistics at Rothamsted after Ronald Fisher. Major contributions to survey design, ANOVA, and experimental design. An early adopter of computers for statistical analysis, he was founder and president of the British Computer Society.
1908 Helen Alma Newton Turner (May 15). Senior principal research scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. Revolutionized Australian sheep breeding and wool production through pioneering applications of population genetics and statistical research methods. Trained with Fisher and Yates at Rothamsted. The Association for the Advancement of Animal Breeding and Genetics established the Turner medal in 1993.
1912 Margaret E. Martin (May 6) ASA Fellow 1961; ASA President 1980 (4th woman); ASA Founders Award 1989. Assistant chief of the Statistical Policy Division US Office of Management and Budget. Developer of the US Current Population Survey, the primary source of labor statistics for the federal government. First executive director of the Committee on National Statistics.
1913 Mindel Sheps (May 19) ASA Fellow 1970. Best known for her highly influential 1958 paper on the asymmetry of relative risk and how it is affected by baseline risk and choice of outcome reference group. She also made substantial contributions to mathematical demography and demographic methodology.
1917 William Thomas Tutte (May 4) A world leader in graph and matroid theory and combinatorics, he is best known for statistical methods developed for deciphering the German Lorenz cipher Tunny at Bletchley Park during WWII. His decoding skills plus the genius of engineer Tommy Flowers led to development of Colossus, the first programmable electronic computer.
1918 Frank Anscombe (May 13) ASA Fellow 1956. Best known for Anscombe’s quartet, the most compelling argument ever made why data should be plotted before analysis. He also did important work on variance-stabilizing transforms, residuals and outliers in linear regression, experimental validity, randomization of block designs, and statistical computing.
1920 Edward Kaplan (May 11) Best known for 1958 paper on the Kaplan-Meier product-limit statistic for estimating survival functions from lifetime data. Now one of the most cited statistics papers of modern times, it took more than 12 years to catch on. Unlike his co-author, Paul Meier, Kaplan never received any awards, and his death was almost unnoticed by major mathematical and statistical societies.
1921 Mavis Batey (May 5) Last surviving member of Bletchley Park’s WWII decoders. She cracked both the Italian navy and German Abwehr Enigma ciphers, enabling the double cross deception that ensured the success of the D-Day landings.
1926 William Haddon Jr. (May 24) Father of modern injury epidemiology. A physician, he is best known for the Haddon Matrix, an analytical tool based on the epidemiological triad (host-agent-environment) to understand how injuries and harms occur and to develop strategies for prevention.
1942 Jane (Arnott) Wadsworth (May 1) Royal Statistical Society Fellow 1976. Medical statistician and pioneering sexual health researcher. The 1994 National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles was the largest, most authoritative survey of human sexual behavior ever performed in the UK. Although dismissed by the tabloid press as “boring and predictable,” it was famously banned from public funding by Thatcher but later funded by the Wellcome Trust.
Events in May
1728 On May 21, Gabriel Cramer (1704–1752), a Genevan mathematician, writes a letter to Nicholas Bernoulli in which he is first to use the term “expectation” [“l’espérance mathematique”] in its modern mathematical sense. Laplace later uses it in his Théorie Analytique des Probabilités. It first appears in English in 1838 in Augustus de Morgan’s An Essay on Probabilities.
1777 On May 5, Leonard Euler introduces i to represent an imaginary number i² = −1 in his paper, “De formulis differentialibus angularibus maxime irrationalibus, quas tamen per logarithms et areus cireulares integrare licet”; die 5. Maii 1777. Gauss standardizes its use in 1801.
1780 On May 31, Laplace reads his Mémoire sur le calcul aux suites appliqué aux probabilités to the l’Académie Royale des Sciences. Although he didn’t call it that, he describes inverse probability, or assignment of a probability distribution to an unobserved variable. Ronald Fisher changed the term inverse probability to “Bayesian” in 1950.
1838 In May, the Statistical Society of London (now Royal Statistical Society) begins their society journal. However, mathematical statistics did not appear until 1885, when Francis Edgeworth read a wide-ranging paper on statistical methodology that included topics on probability, distributions, and significance testing. From the discussion, it seems nobody knew what he was talking about, claiming they “didn’t have time” to read his paper.
1850 In May 1850, the Epidemiological Society of London had its first meeting. Statistical methodology was introduced by John Snow in May 1853, when he read a paper demonstrating how statistics could be applied to understand mortality rates and causes of death.
1892 Throughout May and June, Francis Edgeworth (1845–1926) gives a series of six Newmarch lectures, “On the Uses and Methods of Statistics,” at University College London. For his lecture on correlation, Edgeworth borrows Galton’s quincunx and later tells Galton in a letter that it “worked splendidly and imparted distinction to my discourse.”
1923 On May 28, William Seeley Gosset (‘Student’) presents the first modern tabular layout of the analysis of variance in a paper read to the Society of Biometricians and Mathematical Statisticians. It was a footnote in his paper published in December 1923. He credits Ronald Fisher with the computations. Fisher & Winifred Mackenzie had already published the first systematic description of analysis of variance in May.
1924 On May 16, Walter A. Shewhart (ASA Fellow 1934; ASA President 1945) wrote a one-page memo to his boss presenting a prototype statistical control chart. This triggered the later development of statistical process control and quality improvement revolutionizing industry and manufacturing.
1935 On Mother’s Day, May 12, Louis I. Dublin (ASA Fellow 1916; ASA President 1924) published an article in the Sunday Star showing that US maternal death rates were among the highest in the developed world. He noted that women dying in pregnancy and childbirth were mostly the poor who could not afford regular health care.
1937 On May 11, Maurice Kendall reads a paper, “Randomness and Random Sampling,” to the study group of the Royal Statistical Society. He and coauthor B. Babington Smith describe the first motorized benchtop “randomising machine” and present a table of the first 5,000 digits it generated.
1971 On May 1, the Canadian Parliament passes a new statistics act, renaming the Dominion Bureau of Statistics as Statistics Canada and increasing its mandate for better population data access, collection and sharing, policy formulation, and statistical research.
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