#OTD 1759 William Playfair b (d 11 Feb 1823) A Scottish engineer he invented or improved numerous statistical graphics methods still used today, including line, area, bar & pie charts. 1/3

AmStat History of Statistics @hos-asa.bsky.social is taking a break for a few weeks to attend the Royal Statistical Society conference & then go walkabout. Posts will resume the last week of September.

#OTD 31 Aug 1918 Major André-Louis Cholesky is killed in action. His matrix decomposition method for solving systems of n linear equations is published posthumously. Thirty years later in 1948 Alan Turing demonstrates the stability of the method for large-n machine computations.

#OTD 31 Aug 1907 Ruth Rice Puffer b (d 2 Sep 2002) ASA Fellow 1966, public health biostatistics and head of the Department of Health Statistics of the Pan American Health Organization . On their 100th anniversary PAHO listed her in the top 100 "public health heroes".

#OTD 1890 Julie E Backer b (d 31 Dec 1977) ISI Fellow 1948, bureau chief for the Norwegian Central Bureau of Statistics 1936–1956 & an influential researcher on public health, infant mortality, & population statistics

In 1605 Francis Bacon complains about researchers exaggerating scientific claims without substantive evidence & accepting claims of others as true without doing due diligence: he called this the “contract of error” (An Advancement of Learning)

In Aug 1934 the term ‘likelihood’ is first used in a Bayesian context by Harold Jeffreys as the "the theorem of Inverse Probability" where posterior probability is proportional to the product of the prior probability & the likelihood. Ronald Fisher had first used the term in its modern sense in 1921

#OTD 1882 Ethel May Newbold b (d 25 Mar 1933), Royal Statistical Society Fellow 1921, epidemiologist and first woman to be awarded the Guy Silver Medal in 1928. In 2014 the Bernoulli Society established the Ethel Newbold Prize for excellence in mathematical statistics research. #WomenInSTEM

#OTD 1925 Jeanne Ridley b (d 17 Jul 2007) ASA Fellow 1976, professor of sociology, she was a frequent collaborator with Mindel Sheps (ASA Fellow 1970) in research on human demography, fertility, natality, & population dynamics. #WomenInSTEM

#OTD 27 Aug 1910 Irene Hess b (d 5 Jul 2009), ASA Fellow 1972, Pioneer director of the Institute for Social Research ISR and founding chair ASA Section on Survey Research Methods. Frequent collaborator with Leslie Kish on survey sampling methodology #WomenInSTEM

#OTD 27 Aug 1904 Cuthbert Daniel b (d 8 AUG 1997), ASA Fellow 1955, made major contributions to industrial applications of experimental design. He saw the statistical light when his biochemist wife introduced him to Ronald Fisher’s 'Statistical Methods for Research Workers'.

#OTD 1892 Hilda Mary Woods b (d 29 Nov 1971) Royal Statistical Society Fellow 1926, medical statistician, first woman lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and coauthor of one of the first textbooks of medical (as opposed to vital) statistics 1931. @cwstat.bsky.social

OTD 1954 Kathryn Chaloner b (d 19 Oct 2014), ASA Fellow 1994, ISI Fellow, 2014 Elizabeth L Scott award, developed methods in optimal Bayesian experimental design and did important work on clinical trial design for infectious disease & women's health #WomenInSTEM

#OTD 1921 Charles Dunnett b (d 18 May 2007) ASA Fellow 1965, President Statistical Society of Canada 1982, SSC Gold Medal 1986. Awarded MBE for his WWII Royal Navy radar work. Developer of Dunnett’s test for multiple comparisons, one of the top 25 most-cited statistics papers of modern times

#OTD 1875 Henry Lewis Rietz b (d 7 Dec 1943) ASA Fellow 1923, ASA Vice-President 1925. A leader in establishing mathematical statistics in the US, he was founding member & first president of Institute of Mathematical Statistics IMS in 1935, editor for Annals of Mathematical Statistics #AmStatNews

#OTD 1909 Florence Nightingale (FN) David b (d 23 Jul 1993), ASA Fellow 1954; IMS Fellow, best known for work on combinatorics, correlation and history of probability. First winner of ASA Elizabeth Scott award in 1992 for increasing opportunities for women in statistics. #WomenInSTEM #HistSci 1/5

In Aug 1673 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz introduces the term ‘function’, but in a non-analytical sense (he referred to analytic expressions as ‘relatio’). In 1698 Johann Bernoulli used ‘function’ in the sense of an analytic expression. Euler popularized the use of f(x) notation in 1734. #HistSci

In Aug 1668 Nicolaus Mercator (né Niklaus Kauffman) publishes the Logarithmotechnica in which he presents the Mercator series ln(1+x) and uses the term ‘natural logarithm’ (logarithmus naturalis). He may have pinched the idea from Pietro Mengoli. #HistSci

#OTD 1710 Thomas Simpson b (d 14 May 1761) His 1755 paper “On the Advantage of taking the Mean of a Number of Obfervations in Practical Aftronomy” is a milestone in statistical inference. 1/6 🧵

#OTD 1857 George E Roberts b (d 6 Jun 1948) ASA Fellow 1916; 15th ASA President 1920. Economist & Director of the United States Mint 1898-1907, &1910-1914 #AMSTATNEWS

In Aug 1931 Harold Hotelling (ASA Fellow 1937) publishes a generalization of Student's t-test, now known as Hotelling T2 distribution, for multivariate hypothesis testing. He also defines ‘probable error’ as what was later called confidence intervals. #HistSci

Afternoon Tea Week Part 4: Cutting Cake. In 1904 Francis Galton describes how to cut a cake on “mathematical principles” so it presents the least area to the air. It was published in Nature (ikr?)

Afternoon Tea Week Part 3: Cake. In 1957, William Cochran & Gertrude Cox demonstrate linear hierarchical modelling with data from Frances E Cook’s 1938 master’s thesis on chocolate cake. Cook performed 15 replicates of a randomized trial of 3 recipes & 6 baking temperatures, which is a lot of cake.

#BOTD Kimiko Osada Bowman (d 13 Jan 2019), ASA Fellow 1976, ISI Fellow 1978, IMS Fellow 1987, AAAS Fellow 1970. Pioneered methods for approximating probability distributions of maximum likelihood estimators; developed divergent series algorithms for large computers. 1/2 #WomenInSTEM #HistSci

Afternoon Tea Week: Tea Part 2. In 1872 Francis Galton describes quantitative results of “a number of experiments on the art of making good tea.” He boils it down (as it were) to 3 factors: time, quantity, and temperature.

To commemorate Afternoon Tea Week 11-17 August, recall the famous “Lady Tasting Tea” experiment devised by Ronald Fisher in the 1920s. Muriel Bristol (an algae specialist at Rothamsted) claimed she could detect the order in which milk was added to tea. 1/2

#OTD 1914 Lenore Epstein Bixby b (d 5 Apr 1994), ASA Fellow 1969, served as Deputy Assistant Commissioner Office of Research, Director Division of Retirement and Survivors' Studies, & Committee on National Statistics of the National Academy of Sciences.

#OTD 1895 Egon Pearson b (d 12 Jun 1980) , Royal Statistical Society President 1955, Guy Gold Medal 1955. Best known with Jerzy Neyman of the Neyman-Pearson lemma 1933 for statistical hypothesis testing, first explicit consideration of alternative hypotheses, Type I & Type II errors. 1/2

In Aug 1962 John Nelder statistician & keen birdwatcher, publishes a statistical analysis of the ‘Hastings Rarities’, the “birdwatchers Piltdown Fraud”. He uses χ2-squared tests to suggest patterns of rare bird records were likely due to fraud by taxidermist George Bristow. 1/2

#OTD 1880 Major Greenwood b (d 5 Oct 1949), President Royal Statistical Society 1934, Guy Silver (1924) and Gold (1945) Medals, he was leading medical statistician of the first half of the 20th century & played a key role in the development of medical statistics in the UK.

Seventy years ago this month (Aug 1955) the term “artificial intelligence” is coined in a proposal for a summer workshop submitted by Claude Shannon (Bell Labs), John McCarthy (Dartmouth), Marvin Minsky (Harvard), and Nathaniel Rochester (IBM). The workshop took place in July and August 1956.

#OTD 1868 Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz b (d 15 Jul 1931) Known for his 1898 ‘Das Gesetz der kleinen Zahlen’ [The Law of Small Numbers], describing application of the Poisson distribution to analysis of rare events. It made famous the data on the number of deaths by horse-kick in the Prussian army 1/2

#OTD 1977 Martin Bland & Doug Altman publish together for the first time. It was a comment in Lancet criticizing an article that confused association with causation. (A previous comment on what "random" actually means was - sadly - rejected). 1/2

#OTD Happy🎂 to two former ASA Presidents: Wesley Mitchell & Rensis Likert. Wesley C Mitchell b 5 Aug 1874 (d 29 Oct 1948) ASA Fellow 1916, 13th ASA president 1918. Economist, pre-eminent researcher on business cycles; founding member & 1st Director National Bureau for Economic Research (NBER). 1/2

#OTD 1908 Mildred Barnard b (d 9 Mar 2000) With Betty Allan and Helen Newton Turner one of 3 “Founding Mothers” of the Biostatistics division at CSIRO Australia and first woman to chair the Brisbane Branch of the International Biometrics Society.

#OTD 1834 John Venn b (d 4 Apr 1923) FRS Brilliant mathematician (Cambridge Tripos 6th Wrangler 1857) he wrote an 1866 book on probability The Logic of Chance but he is better known for his eponymous diagram. His first published diagram was for two terms x & y in 1880.

In Aug 1971 in an unusual departure for an ASA presidential address, newly elected 66th ASA President Churchill Eisenhart (ASA Fellow 1943) gives a comprehensive historical overview of a central problem of statistical inference, the choice of the "best" mean. 1/2

First they came for the statisticians, and you said nothing. Then they came for the statistics, and you were silent. They came for the digits, the keyboards, the pencils, and still nobody spoke out. Then they came for you, but nobody cared, because surely…the numbers don’t lie.

#OTD 1902 Mina Rees b (d 25 Oct 1997) Mathematician & computing pioneer: 1st F president AAAS; IEEE Computer Pioneer Award 1989 for development of fast computer technology. 1/3

#OTD 1936 Donald Mainland publishes a simple method for determining “limits for the true odds” for a small sample (n = 7) #clinicaltrial & a sample size calculation (computed by Ronald Fisher), then begs for improved medical statistics education 1/5🧵

RIP Tom Lehrer and thanks for all the memories. www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWLe... DYK? he also wrote 2 papers with statistical applications AND invented the Jello shot. He gave up on his PHD dissertation work on the statistical mode after dinking around for 15 years (paper references below) 1/2

#OTD 1843 Friedrich R Helmert b (d 15 Jun 1917) Although well-known in his time for his book on least squares (1872, 1902) (the standard text for years), overlooked was his development of χ2 distribution attributed to Karl Pearson 1/3

#OTD 1788 Francois Cretté de Palluel (1741-1798) describes the first use of the Latin square as an experimental design, 150 years before Fisher. He tested weight gains of 16 sheep in a 4 x 4 design with 4 diets, 4 breeds & 4 slaughter times

#OTD 1801 William Playfair introduces the pie chart in his book *takes deep breath * “The Statistical Breviary; Shewing, on a Principle Entirely New, the Resources of Every State and Kingdom in Europe; Illustrated with Stained Copper-Plate Charts,... 1/2

#OTD 1962 Ronald Aylmer Fisher d (b 17 Feb 1890). His ashes are interred at St Peter's Cathedral North Adelaide Australia. After retiring from Cambridge in 1957 he became senior research fellow at CSIRO but made many trips abroad to attend statistics meetings & visit colleagues & family

#OTD 1976 Karin Kock-Lindberg d (b 2 July 1891) ASA Fellow 1956, ISI 1958, first female professor of economics in Sweden, she was Director of Statistics Sweden & Chair Swedish Statistical Society

#OTD 1868 Povl Heiberg b (d 12 May 1963) Danish physician. Although unknown today, he was among the earliest (1897, revisited 1940) to describe the role of statistical thinking in evidence-based medicine. He warns about too-small trials, risk of bias & random errors (‘the play of chance’) 1/2

OTD 1945 William Carter Jenkins b (d 17 Feb 2019) “Tuskegee whistle-blower” epidemiologist. One of the first Africa Americans recruited to the US Public Health Service, he became a social justice activist exposing & correcting systemic racism in US health care & research 1/5 🧵

#OTD 1874 Robert H Coats b (d 7 Feb 1960) ASA Fellow 1922; 33rd ASA President 1938; Hon Fellow RSS. He was the first Dominion Statistician of Canada 1915, & established Dominion Bureau of Statistics 1918, now Statistics Canada.

#OTD 1840 Carroll D Wright b (d 20 Feb 1909) 5th ASA President 1897-1909. In 1908 he started 2 new ASA traditions: the yearly ASA President address & locating ASA meetings somewhere other than Washington or Boston. 1/2