The word ‘algorithm’ is surprisingly old. 'Algorithmus' (the term used by Leibnitz 1684) was derived from the Latinised surname of mathematician Al-Khwarizmi (c. 780 - c.850) to denote the 'new' process of reckoning with Hindu-Arabic numerals.

Halbert L Dunn b #OTD 1896 (d 14 Nov 1975) ASA Fellow 1939, Chief National Office of Vital Statistics 1935-1960. For better or worse the father of the wellness movement (Yes), he should also be known for the earliest known review (1929) of the statistical quality of clinical & preclinical research.

Happy🎂to the control chart b #OTD 1924. The brainchild of Walter Shewhart (ASA Fellow 1934; ASA President 1945) it first shows up in a 1-page memo to his boss. It eventually launches the entire field of statistical process control & quality improvement.

Helen Alma Newton Turner b #OTD 1908 (d 26 Nov 1995). Consulting statistician to CSIRO, she pioneered the application of population genetics & statistics to sheep breeding & wool production in Australia. The Turner medal was established in her honour in 1993

#OTD 1917 William Thomas Tutte b (d 2 May 2002) A code breaker at Bletchley during WWII he later became a world leader in graph & matroid theory & combinatorics.

#OTD 1899 Joseph Berkson b (d 12 Sep 1982) ASA Fellow 1940. Introduced the logit model 1944, & Berkson’s paradox (collider or ascertainment bias). Like Fisher, he strenuously opposed the idea that smoking causes cancer, complaining about poor quality observational data & being a heavy smoker himself

Happy 🎂 to Frank Anscombe b #OTD 1918 (d 17 Oct 2001) ASA Fellow 1956. Best known for the most compelling argument ever made why data should be plotted before analysis. 'Anscombe's Quartet' shows 4 data sets with identical summary statistics but very different distributions

Happy 206th 🎂 to Florence Nightingale b #OTD 1820 (d 13 Aug 1910). Not only founder of modern nursing, she was a renowned statistician & dataviz pioneer. First woman member of the Royal Statistical Society 1859 and ASA honorary member 1875. 1/5🧵

Happy🎂 Edward Kaplan b #OTD 1920 (d 26 Sep 2006) Best known for 1958 “sleeper hit” paper on the Kaplan–Meier product-limit statistic for estimating survival functions from lifetime data. It took >12 yrs to catch on; now it is one of the most cited statistics papers of modern times. 1/5🧵

#OTD 1754 Colonel Sir John Sinclair b (d 21 Dec 1835) Introduced the words ‘statistics’ & ‘statistical’ for the first time in English in his 1791 21-vol magnum opus 'Statistical Account of Scotland'. He apologized for anglicizing German words rather than coining real English words 1/3

The first use of the term ‘binomial’ in English was by Robert Record in 1557: "The nombers that be compound with + be called Bimedialles... If their partes be of 2 denominations, then thei named Binomialles properly". There you are then.

Leonard Henry Caleb (LHC) Tippett b #OTD 1902 (d 9 Nov 1985) ASA Fellow 1950; RSS President 1965; Guy Silver Medal 1954; Shewhart Medal 1962. A pioneer of statistical quality control & operations research, he invented the random number table & codeveloped extreme value analysis for rare events

In 1888 the UCL 'Newmarch Lectures on Economic Science illustrated by Statistics' were established. Francis Edgeworth was the first external Lecturer. Beginning May 1892 he gave six lectures "On the Uses and Methods of Statistics". He borrowed Galton’s quincunx for his lecture on correlation

Margaret E Martin b #OTD 1912 (d 16 May 2012) ASA Fellow 1961; ASA President 1980 (4th woman). Assistant Chief Statistical Policy Division, US Office of Management and Budget. Developer of the US Current Population Survey. First executive director of the Committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT)

#OTD 1777 Leonard Euler introduces i to represent an imaginary number i² = −1. The show-stopping title of his paper is 'De formulis differentialibus angularibus maxime irrationalibus, quas tamen per logarithms et areus cireulares integrare licet; die 5. Maii 1777'

#OTD 1921 Mavis Batey b (d 12 Nov 2013). The last surviving member of Bletchley Park's WWII decoders, she cracked both the Italian Navy & German Abwehr Enigma ciphers, enabling the Double Cross deception that ensured the success of the D-Day landings.

#OTD 1860 Joseph Adna Hill b (d 12 Dec 1938). Inaugural ASA Fellow 1914, ASA President 1919. Chief statistician for the U.S. Census Bureau, he developed the Huntington-Hill method (still used) for proportional allocation of legislative seats to states or political parties

In May 1850 the Epidemiological Society of London met for the first time at Hanover Square, London. John Snow was a founding member; in May 1853 he presented a paper on the application of statistics to epidemiology & 1854 a map of the Broad St cholera outbreak

#OTD 1834 the first officers and Council of the newly created Statistical Society of London (now Royal Statistical Society) were elected. The Society was founded by Adolph Quetelet, Charles Babbage, Thomas Malthus & Richard Jones. There were 411 members in the first year

#OTD 1860 D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson b (d 21 Jun 1948) In his classic book ‘On Growth & Form’ he proposed that major differences in biological shape & pattern could be described by relatively simple geometric transformations & mathematical models like the logarithmic spiral.

#OTD 1942 Jane Wadsworth b (d 12 Jul 1997) RSS Fellow, medical statistician at Barts & St Mary's & a pioneering sexual health researcher. Her work on the 1994 National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles NATSAL was vital for contributing to the near-eradication of HIV in the UK

#OTD 1971 Statistics Canada/Statistique Canada replaces the original Dominion Bureau of Statistics. The head of StatCan is chief statistician of Canada. StatCan has been recognised by The Economist as the “best statistical organization in the world”

1 May 1 #OTD 1875 Malcolm C. Rorty (d 18 Jan 1936) ASA Fellow 1921, ASA President 1932. Founder of the National Bureau of Economic Research, he was a telephone lineman turned Bell Telephone engineer turned economist. In 1903 a memo of his becomes a pioneering paper on service demand forecasting

#OTD 1916 Claude Shannon b (d 24 Feb 2001) Mathematician & Bell Labs engineer, father of communication & algorithmic information theory, & developer of the first experiments in AI. His work was fundamental to the internet, digital computers, smart phones, zip files & jpgs. 1/3

Happy🎂Carl Friedrich Gauss b #OTD 1777 b (d 23 Feb 1855) “The Prince of Mathematicians” & one of the most influential mathematicians of all time. We still use his work on probability, least squares, & numeric integration, & even algorithms for calculating discrete Fourier transforms.

John Arbuthnot baptised #OTD 1667 (d 27 Feb 1735) ‘Physitian in Ordinary’ to Queen Anne, he developed the first formal significance test of ‘the Exacte Ballance’ of human sex ratios at birth with 82 years of data 1/5 🧵

#OTD 2015 Eva E Jacobs d (b 17 Jan 1921) ASA Fellow 1982. Chief of Consumer Expenditure Surveys at the Bureau of Labor Statistics & editor of the Handbook of US Labor Statistics 1997-2008 1/3

#OTD 1657 Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695) publishes De Ratiociniis in Ludo, the earliest printed work to define and systematize concepts such as expectation. It was THE text on probability theory for the next 50 years, it influenced Jacob Bernoulli & de Moivre among others 1/2

#OTD 1898 William O Kermack b (d 20 Jul 1970). Codeveloper with Anderson Gray McKendrick of their eponymous mathematical theory of epidemic disease spread, the origin of SIRS epidemiological models. 1/3

#OTD 25 Apr 1879 Edward Bidwell Wilson b (d 28 Dec 1964). ASA Fellow 1924, ASA President 1929. The Wilson score interval for binary variables 1927 anticipates the confidence interval, now attributed to Neyman & Pearson. Although Wilson himself denied it Neyman acknowledged Wilson’s priority.

#OTD 1903 Andrei Kolmogorov b (d 20 Oct 1987) One of the developers of modern probability theory. What is now known as the Kolmogorov-Smirnov goodness of fit test was published in Italian in 1933, consolidated with the work of Nikolai Smirnov by William Feller, & popularized by Frank Massey 1951

Happy 🎂David Blackwell b #OTD 1919 (d 8 Jul 2010). ASA Fellow 1962, ASA Vice President 1978, National Medal of Science (posthumous) 2014. First African American to be elected to ASA & National Academy of Sciences. Best known for Rao–Blackwell theorem & pioneering text on Bayesian statistics. 1/2

Carl Snyder b #OTD 23 Apr 1869 (d 15 Feb 1946) ASA Fellow 1923, ASA President 1928. Beginning as a journalist & science writer he somehow ended up as Chief Statistician for the Federal Reserve Bank, & later an economic policy leader, especially for his work on long-term economic growth & capitalism

Also #OTD 22 Apr 1916 Lee Cronbach b (d 1 Oct 2001) ASA Fellow 1956, Fellow AAAS; known for Cronbach's α, he did enormously influential work on measurement theory, test performance quantification, program evaluation, & concepts of validity (which have extended far beyond psychology)

#OTD 1891 Sir Harold Jeffreys b (d 18 Mar 1989) Guy Gold Medal 1962. A geophysicist known for his ideas on Bayesian theories of probability and Jeffrey’s prior. Bayesian statistics were overwhelmed by the dominance of the Fisher-Neyman-Pearson school (which he opposed) 1/5🧵

#OTD 1942 Sir Maurice Kendall ASA Fellow 1950, reads his paper ‘On the Future of Statistics’ before the Royal Statistical Society. Eighty-four years later, how many of his predictions pan out? 1/4🧵

#OTD 1923 Jacob Cohen b (d 20 Jan 1998) ASA Fellow 1983, Psychologist & statistician, developer of Cohen’s kappa, d, and h for effect size, & critic of misapplications of null hypothesis significance testing ["The Earth is Round (p < .05)" is a classic].

Ronald Fisher again. Today is the 104th anniversary of The One Ring to Rule Them All: #OTD 1922 Fisher publishes his paper "On the Mathematical Foundations of Theoretical Statistics". It ushers in modern mathematical statistics which until then lacked a unifying structure. 1/3

In April 1912, as a third-year undergraduate student at Cambridge, RA Fisher publishes his first mathematical paper ‘On an Absolute Criterion for Fitting Frequency Curves’. This is the earliest iteration of what he would later call the method of maximum likelihood.

In April 1959 Nathan Mantel and William Haenzel published a method for effective use of heterogeneous retrospective study data, one of the earliest examples of analytical rather than descriptive epidemiology. The Mantel-Haenszel test is now key for analysing stratified or matched categorical data.

#OTD 1894 Jerzy Neyman b (d 5 Aug 1981). ASA Fellow 1942; RSS Guy Gold Medal 1966; ASA Wilks Award 1968; US National Medal of Science 1969. Codeveloper with Egon Pearson of the ‘hypothesis testing’ paradigm (Neyman–Pearson lemma 1933) 1/3

#OTD 1707 Leonhard Euler b (d 18 Sep 1783) Laplace called him the “Master of us all”. Polymath & prolific in every sense of the word (>860 publications, 13 children) he created modern mathematical thinking 1/4 🧵

#OTD 1912 RSS Titanic sank after an iceberg strike, killing 1502 of 2224 people on board. In 1996 Robert Dawson published the first public database, used ever since for teaching contingency analysis, risk, logistic regression, prediction modelling, machine learning & data visualization.

#OTD 1787 Pierre Charles-Alexandre Louis b (d 22 Aug 1872) pioneer of the “numerical method’ for obtaining clinical information from case data, precursor to modern case-control methods in epidemiology. 1/5🧵

#OTD 1912 Herman Otto (HO) Hartley b (d 30 Dec 1980) ASA Fellow 1953, ASA President 1979, ENAR President 1959. Developed the F-max test & made substantial contributions to sampling theory, optimization, variance component estimation, cancer drug safety, correspondence analysis, survey design. 1/2

#OTD 1878 Kirstine Smith b (d 11 Nov 1939) inventor of optimal designs; her 1918 PhD thesis at UCL described G-optimal designs for polynomial regression. Her work was virtually unnoticed for almost a half-century until its rediscovery by Jack Kiefer in 1959. 1/4 🧵

#OTD 1907 Henry Scheffé b (d 5 Jun 1977) ASA Fellow 1951, ASA VP 1954-6; Fellow ISI, IMS Fellow & President. Developer of Scheffé method for multiple comparisons, optimal tests for equality of variances & quality control, mixture designs, & nonparametric statistics. 1/2

#OTD 1755 Thomas Simpson (1710-1761) reads his paper on error distributions to the Royal Society “on the Advantage of taking the Mean of a Number of Obfervations in Practical Aftronomy”, a milestone in statistical inference. 1/3

#OTD 1810 Pierre-Simon de Laplace (1749-1827) reads his paper on the Central Limit Theorem to the Académie de Sciences It took him about 40 yrs to develop & a theorem was not explicitly stated: he devised it as a tool ....1/3🧵

Today is the anniversary of the Box-Cox power transform. #OTD 1964 George Box & David R Cox read their paper “An Analysis of Transformations” at the RSS meeting. It describes methods for reducing nonnormality of errors in a linear model. The paper began with their names then found the topic. 1/3