The American Statistical Association’s 2018 Karl E. Peace Award for Outstanding Statistical Contributions for the Betterment of Society recognized the work of leading human rights mathematician Patrick Ball of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group.
Yugoslavia
Peace Through Statistics
The list of recent Nobel Peace Prize laureates goes as follows: 2009—Barack H. Obama, president of the United States of America; 2010—Liu Xiaobo, Chinese dissident; 2011—Miodrag Lovrić (Serbia), Jasmin Komić (Bosnia and Herzegovina), and Ksenija Dumičić (Croatia), statisticians.
That’s a joke, isn’t it? Actually, no, but a possible (perhaps not very likely) outcome for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize award. Lovrić, Komić, and Dumičić were among the 241 nominations (188 individuals and 53 organizations) entered by the February 1, 2011, deadline for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize. What led to the nomination of a group of three statisticians for such a prestigious award?