Penny S. Reynolds
BIRTHDAYS
1731 Francis Maseres, a lawyer, was one of the earliest statistical popularizers. He edited, reprinted, and provided commentary for major essays on probability by John Napier and Christiaan Huygens, among others. His larger mission to introduce mathematics to the public was a failure, as he rejected all advanced methods he could not understand.
1780 Mary Somerville was tutor to Ada Lovelace and introduced her to Charles Babbage. Her 1831 translation of Laplace’s Mécanique Céleste was a thorough mathematical exposition and expansion of Laplace’s methods, at the time almost unknown in England.
1791 Charles Babbage was co-founder of the Statistical Society of London (now the Royal Statistical Society) in 1834. Although considered father of the computer by some, his difference engine was impractical and never really worked, provoking a long feud with Sir George Airy.
1865 Charles P. Neill (ASA Fellow, 1916; ASA President, 1916) Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, he was instrumental in exposing unsanitary and unsafe practices in the meat packing industry and for women and children millworkers. He was instrumental in legislating the eight-hour workday.
1878 Ethel Mary Elderton was one of the first women to be formally trained for a science career in Britain. She worked closely with Francis Galton and Karl Pearson and was a eugenicist. With her brother, she wrote Primer of Statistics (1909), which ran to five editions.
1880 William Cope Brinton (ASA Fellow, 1922) A pioneer of modern data visualization methods, author of the first American book on graphic techniques, and chair of the first meeting of the ASA Joint Committee on Standards for Graphic Presentation in December of 1914. Although William Playfair is credited with inventing the bar chart, Brinton coined the name.
1883 Edmund Ezra Day (ASA Fellow, 1921; ASA President, 1927) Educator, economist, first director of the division of the social sciences of the Rockefeller Foundation, and president of Cornell University. During WWI, he worked as a statistician for the War Industries Board and United States Shipping Board.
1883 Frances (Chick) Wood (RSS Fellow, 1913; Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, Member ) made pioneering research contributions to theoretical statistics, education, cancer, and labor statistics. First woman member of the Royal Statistical Society Council (1915) and RSS Executive Committee (1917). The RSS Frances Wood Medal is awarded for outstanding contributions to economic or social statistics.
1889 Sewall Wright (ASA Fellow, 1944) was a pioneer of population genetics and cofounder with Ronald Fisher and JBS Haldane of the evolutionary biology modern synthesis. Credited with developing the coefficient of determination R2, the inbreeding coefficient, and path analysis.
1894 Enid Charles was a pioneer in modern demography and population statistics applications. A regional adviser and statistical consultant for the World Health Organization, her most important work on fertility and marriage rates was done at the Dominion Bureau of Statistics (now Statistics Canada )1940–1946.
1895 Lancelot Hogben was a medical statistician and experimental biologist. Developed the N-of-1 clinical trial, argued against ‘the tyranny of averages,’ opposed eugenics, and promoted the African-clawed frog Xenopus as a model organism for reproductive studies.
1900 Margaret Merrell (ASA Fellow, 1951; AAAS Fellow). Chief statistician and consultant to the surgeon general of the United States Army. As the first female full professor at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, she was internationally recognized as one of the finest teachers of biostatistics for health professionals.
1906 Irene Barnes Taeuber (ASA Fellow, 1960) Demographer and ‘practical statistician,’ she significantly influenced the development of demography as a science. Directed the Census Library Project and was first female president of the Population Association of America in 1953.
1910 Jane Worcester (ASA Fellow, 1960) Medical statistician, epidemiologist, and first female chair of biostatistics at Harvard School of Public Health. She emphasized the need for statistical planning before the study began, testing assumptions before analysis, and avoiding data-dredging after data was collected.
1915 Wilfred J. Dixon (ASA Fellow, 1955; ASA Wilks Medal, 1992). Biostatistics professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. Pioneer in health statistics and health informatics, his commitment to excellence in statistical consulting led to the development of BMDP Statistical Software in 1961, one of the first general statistical software packages.
1916 Frederick Mosteller (ASA Fellow, 1949; ASA President, 1967) Founder of the Harvard Department of Statistics. Eminent statistician and influential statistics educator, he taught the first statistics massive open online courses on educational TV in 1960—one with more than 1 million viewers.
1917 Thomas C. Chalmers was the founder of the Mount Sinai Department of Biostatistics and pioneer in the application of randomized controlled trials and meta-analysis to the evaluation of medical therapeutics.
1921 Otis Dudley Duncan (ASA Fellow, 1961) introduced advanced statistical tools (path analysis, log-linear and Rasch models, spatial analysis) to sociology for identifying empirical patterns of between-group differences, rather than trying to find universal laws of society.
1921 Irene Curran Montie (President, Caucus for Women in Statistics, 1979) US Census Bureau statistician and director of the Survey and Statistical Design Division, US Department of Energy.
1922 Martin B. Wilk (ASA Fellow, 1962; ASA Vice President, 1980–1982; President, Statistical Society of Canada; Chief Statistician of Canada, 1980–1985. Best known as developer (with Samuel Shapiro) of the Shapiro-Wilk test in 1965 and Q-Q & P-P plots for graphical comparison of probability distributions (with Ram Gnanadesikan).
EVENTS
1763 On December 23, Richard Price (1723–1791) reads “An Essay Towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances” to the Royal Society. It was written by his friend Thomas Bayes, who died two years before, and forms the basis of what is now called Bayes’ Theorem.
1887 John Venn completes the preface to the third edition of his book The Logic of Chance (published 1888). This edition introduces the first graphical representation of a random walk process.
1894 On December 19, Karl Pearson submits the first of a series of papers about a family of continuous probability distributions for skewed observations. He identified five major types characterized by their third and fourth standardized moments.
1931 On December 17, the Indian Statistical Institute is officially founded. It began with the Statistical Laboratory set up by P.C. Mahalanobis in the early 1920s. In 1959, ISI was declared an institution of national importance by an act of parliament.
1943 On December 7, the ASA Detroit Chapter adopts a (presumably) tongue-in-cheek resolution to protest the omission of statisticians from the Michigan War Manpower Commission list of critical wartime occupations. The resolution makes the front page of the Detroit News two days later.
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