Dr. Richard L. Anderson, one of the modern pioneer statisticians of the United States and a very active supporter of the American Statistical Association, died January 19, 2003, in Lexington, Kentucky, at age 87. An autobiographical sketch of Dr. Anderson appears in The Making of Statisticians. Dr. Anderson requested that we call him Dick. This article is to pay tribute to Dick for his many contributions to the field of statistics and remember him for his relationships with his family, students, and colleagues.

Academics
Dick attended high school in North Liberty, Indiana. …

David Blackwell came to statistics late, but his career in mathematics got an early start. The oldest of four children, Blackwell grew up in Centralia, Illinois, and considered himself fortunate to attend an integrated school at a time when racial segregation was the norm.
Blackwell was always adept at mathematics, but he didn’t much care for algebra or trigonometry. “I could do it,” he said; while he found the math useful and interesting, geometry was what really caught his attention. His high school teacher made the subject beautiful for him. “Geometry …

Megan KruseForeword by Nan Laird
 
As a graduate student in Statistics at Harvard in the early 1970s, I was always on the lookout for a female role model. They were almost impossible to find. While F. N. David was a very familiar name from academic publications, it was hard to know she was a woman; I do not recall ever seeing “Florence Nightingale” David in print. I learned what F. N. stood for from Fred Mosteller, who was fond of revising childhood notions about nurses by referring to the original Florence …

Statistician in history—Oliver William Bourn Peabody

Statistician in history—Edward Jarvis

Statistician in history—Joseph Barlow Felt

Statistician in history—Richard Fletcher

Ivan Fellegi, who held the office of Canada’s chief statistician for 23 years, is a man who respects cleanly collected data with all underlying biases in the data well controlled.

Jerome Cornfield, a former president of the American Statistical Association, was the director of the biostatistics center and a professor of statistics in the department of statistics at The George Washington University. He is also known as one of the world’s leading statisticians.

Charles Louis Kincannon, who was 72 when he passed away in December 2012, enjoyed a rich career in statistics lasting 45 years.